


swing swing swing

by horriblekids



Series: '03verse (trying too hard) [4]
Category: 5 Seconds of Summer (Band)
Genre: 2003 AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-03
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-16 09:49:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 38,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29823126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/horriblekids/pseuds/horriblekids
Summary: “Hang on,” Luke says as they’re heading for the register to ring up his things. “I wanna grab some new sticks, just,” and he drags Michael over to the row of boxes and boxes of drumsticks and picks some out, casually.“Wait,” Michael stammers awkwardly, “You play?”“Yeah,” Luke shrugs, like it’s no big deal. Michael is ten seconds from asking him to be in the band - without consulting Calum, without having a proper practice or conversation about it or anything - when the worst possible thing happens. Across the corridor he spots a familiar figure headed in their direction and he can’t form words, just an alarmed squawk, and he grabs onto Luke before they can exit the store. “Uh, are you alright?” Luke asks him, taking in his probably noticeably paler cheeks and the thin sheen of nervous sweat he can feel forming across his upper lip. Michael clutches his upper arm, trying to decide if it’s less conspicuous if they hide behind a magazine rack or if he drops dead on the spot.OR: What Michael did after Ashton broke up with him in 2003.
Relationships: Michael Clifford/Alex Gaskarth, Michael Clifford/Ashton Irwin, Michael Clifford/Louis Tomlinson, Michael Clifford/Luke Hemmings
Series: '03verse (trying too hard) [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2170044
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	swing swing swing

**Author's Note:**

> This is the last of the stuff that needed to be reposted! We made it, folks! 
> 
> This is the sequel to walking backwards, so I would recommend reading that first if you haven't, though it's not completely necessary to understand this fic. Basically I just thought, "What did Michael do for 5 years without Ashton?" and this, as it turns out, is the answer to that question. Title is from "Swing, Swing" by the All-American Rejects. My playlists are here and here.

They’re in Calum’s room again several weeks later - and they’ve never talked about it, have they? - with Michael sprawled out on the bed and Calum’s head in his lap while they play FIFA. It’s apparent that Calum is going to win the game, seeing as he actually understands the rules of footie whereas Michael just jabs at the buttons on the controller angrily. School holidays are almost over and Michael’s trying not to be bitter about the loss of Calum’s undivided attention once footie practices start up after school again in the afternoons. He’s been trying not to think about it. “Pass me another Mountain Dew,” he says, holding his hand out expectantly for another soda.

Calum obliges, reaching down beside the bed. “You’re welcome,” Calum goes. In thanks Michael scrapes his nails across Calum’s scalp, hair recently shorn in anticipation of the upcoming school year. The hairs are still short and prickly where they’ve been cut into a kind of faux-hawk. They cut it in Calum and Mali-Koa’s bathroom; Mali had laughed and brushed the tufts of hair from Calum’s shoulders afterward and feigned innocence when their mum had yelled at him and Michael. She hadn’t made Calum get rid of it, though, and so for a little while Michael had been pissed that Calum had cooler hair than him. Now he’s content to rub his palm over the shaved sides and enjoy the buzzing prickle against his skin.

“Can I talk to you about something?” Michael asks. He changes his mind a moment later and then says, “No, never mind, it’s stupid.” He stabs at the buttons on his Playstation controller a bit, frowning when Calum’s FIFA team wins yet another round. He should probably make a note to look up the rules of football so he can stop losing so badly. Maybe he can convince Mali to let him borrow her college laptop later; he doesn’t want to go home until he absolutely has to, and anyway Calum and Mali’s house is more like home than his actual home.

“What’s up?” Calum asks, sitting up slightly so he can steal from Michael’s soda can without dribbling all over himself.

Michael rubs the back of his neck uncomfortably. He can already feel the tops of his ears growing hot, which is definitely going to betray his discomfort if Calum can’t already feel his pulse hammering against his ribs desperately trying to set the secret free. “I just,” he says, shifting his leg on the bed slightly. When he’s nervous he has this bad habit of jiggling his knee. To stop himself doing it he flexes his toes slowly, focusing on the movement instead of the words always at the back of his mind. He doesn’t want Calum to hate him. “Is anyone else home right now?” he asks, straining his ears to hear if either of Calum’s parents are home. The only thing he can hear is that JoJo ‘Get Out’ song blaring from Mali’s room. It’s probably safe enough for him to speak without anyone overhearing.

He still waits for Calum to tell him, “Dude, it’s just us and Mali and she’s probably on the phone with her friends.” And Calum sits up and stares at him suspiciously, asks, “What’s been up with you lately anyway? Are you mad at me or something?”

“No, I’m not mad at you, I just,” Michael sighs. “Do you remember that thing that happened last year? The kissing thing?” And - wow, way to put his foot in his mouth this early on in the conversation. He groans internally at his own lameness and continues on. Still, it’s better than mentioning the other thing. “I’ve just been thinking about it a lot,” he says, wringing his hands. If there was a way for him to become completely invisible, now would be the time he would use that power. He wants to shrivel up into a small pile of ashes and float away on a breeze. Calum is looking at him horrified, and if it weren’t Calum’s bed in Calum’s room Michael would be making himself a blanket burrito at this very moment. But this is not actually his house, so instead he shrugs and all his breath comes out in a frustrated little puff, and he goes, “Never mind, it’s really dumb anyways.”

And Calum, with his spidey-senses, punches Michael in the arm and says, “You’re a really bad liar,” and then he leans back against the headboard of the bed, sprawling his skinny legs out over Michael’s lap. He leaves them there until it’s certain Michael won’t run away - he’s prone to bolting out of the Hood house, proud and skittish and abashed - and simply pokes his best friend’s cheek and pointedly says, “Tell me, Mikey.”

So Michael, rather than waiting for the red in his cheeks to fade or the back of his neck to feel less like it’s been set on fire, presses his cheek to Calum’s knee and hides behind his fringe. “I’ve just - um,” he begins. “I think I might be gay,” he says, but it’s in a whisper, a secret hidden at the back of his throat. When it’s obvious that Calum hasn’t heard him he repeats it, louder this time, only instead of ‘think’ he says “I’m pretty sure I’m gay.” And he sits there, hands shaking, anchored in place by his best friend, his blood brother - they made that pact when they were nine years old, safety pin and smears of blood across each other’s palms before Mali discovered them in the downstairs bathroom and ratted them out to Joy - keeping him in place.

He sits.

He waits.

They stare at each other plainly. Calum worries at the inside of his lip like he does; Michael picks at a scab on his elbow diligently, peeling back the new skin to reopen an old scrape from bailing on his skateboard. “Oh,” Calum says. He cocks his head like he’s considering and then, “You said - because of the thing?” and the words come out small and afraid. His hair isn’t long enough to hide behind; not yet, anyway, and so his hand flies to his hair and twists in between the coarse curls, tugging at them from the roots upward. Michael clamps down on the inside of his cheek with his teeth. Now isn’t the time to say anything about Calum’s hair-pulling.

“Yeah,” he confirms, chest feeling hollow. He makes his fingers into a little cage over Calum’s knee, fingertip to fingertip, holding the bad feelings in.

For a moment he thinks he’s going to shatter into pieces when Calum’s knee skitters away from him. “How do you know?” Calum demands, ever logical. “I mean, like, for sure.” And then the knee pushes up into his clasped hands, sharp and bony. Michael presses down his palm against the hard plane of kneecap, thinking.

“I don’t want to kiss you,” he says. Visibly Calum breathes a sigh of relief like a balloon half-deflating. As he begins to relax he pushes the long, heavy strands of his fringe back with one hand and continues to talk. “I just… I thought about it, and I’d kiss another guy probably. Not you though - you’re like a brother to me. Plus I kissed Geordie behind the bleachers last weekend and, like, I didn’t feel anything? So I figured, that kind of confirms it.”

The fist to his jaw is swift and unexpected. “You dick,” Calum hisses. “You kissed Geordie and didn’t tell me?” His weight digging into Michael’s thighs, the soft of his stomach, is comforting. Michael squawks as they nearly topple off the edge of the bed. For a minute they find themselves distracted from the serious conversation by their usual scrabble for dominance, all knees and elbows and fingers pressed to ticklish sides until they’re both in stitches.

“Are you forgetting the part where I just told you I didn’t even like kissing her?” Michael huffs. He’s sprawled on the scratchy carpet on his back breathing heavily; Calum is beside him with his feet tucked between Michael’s ankles comfortably. And he knows that Calum is more annoyed that he’s gone and kissed someone without telling than who it is, anyway. Geordie is one of their oldest friends - she’s a girl but not, like, a girl-girl - and at first he had thought it was the familiarity that had messed things up, but after some deliberation he’s decided that it can’t possibly be a one-off. It was too soft and hesitant, the kiss, bubblegum-flavored and a strange darting thing. Michael would rather something firm, something to ground him to the moment instead of leaving him at loose ends.

“Shut up,” Calum tells him. “Have you kissed any more guys, then?”

“Not yet. But I will,” Michael decides. Not that he’s thinking of anyone in particular - not that he’s thinking about the afternoons at the skatepark when he sees Ashton walking his brother and sister home from daycare, his brother’s small Barney backpack slung over one shoulder and his flaxen hair curling slightly in the humidity, when he wants to say hello or something but can’t make himself talk - but he wants it to happen. He’s pretty sure he’s not allowed to feel that way anymore, though.

Calum asks, “But you’re sure that you don’t want to kiss me?” mournfully. Michael punches him in the gut and leaps back onto the bed before Calum can retaliate, clutching a pillow over his torso protectively. The FIFA music is still playing in the background, the game long since forgotten.

“Yes, I’m sure,” Michael says, smacking Calum with the pillow. It hits him square in the chest with a satisfying _whumph_ sound. The bed frame groans under Calum’s weight when he lurches onto the mattress. He reaches for another of the approximately dozen or so pillows and hits Michael with it before taking up every available inch of space. Then - to his abject horror - they both hear the cough at the door and freeze up at the same instant. Calum’s sister is standing barefoot in the doorway, cordless phone tucked between her ear and shoulder.

Mali’s eyebrow quirks up and for a few seconds Michael is sure she’s going to say something, to tell him how disgusting he is, to get out of their house - but all she actually says is, “Mom wants to know what you guys want on your pizza. She’s on her way home,” and hands the phone off to Calum, who orders ham and pineapple but generously requests onions on Michael’s half of the pizza. She stands in the doorway picking at her fingernails until Calum hangs up the phone and then sits down on the edge of the bed, which is long past the point of sturdy enough to support the weight of all three of them. “So,” she says. “Boys, huh?”

Briefly Michael wonders if he can shove himself inside the pillowcase and hide forever. Instead he buries his face in the soft pillow, cheeks burning once again, and mumbles, “Go away,” and despairs of his entire life. Above him - he’s curled himself into Calum’s lap - Calum and Mali are talking softly. The blood whooshing in his ears is too loud for him to make out what they’re saying. After a minute he feels Mali’s cold fingertips digging into his scalp, scraping across the tender flesh in the same way that she does when they’re bleaching his hair in her bathroom, towel tucked neatly into the collar of his t-shirt. “I hate my life,” he complains weakly. Mali makes a sympathetic noise and pats his head.

“It’s not the end of the world, little brother,” she says. “I’m proud of you. And I’m sorry for eavesdropping. Come on, up,” and then Mali is hugging him tight, Calum joining in to sandwich Michael between them. Their sandwich hugs are the best, Michael thinks, holding onto both siblings a little harder than necessary as he tries not to cry. He had been so afraid they wouldn’t want to be his friends anymore, his family.

Later, when the pizza arrives, Mali steals a slice of the Hawaiian pizza that he and Calum share and flicks him on the nose when he picks the olives off her vegetarian slice. She lets them borrow the laptop again to look up new music in Calum’s bedroom, sitting with her legs stretched out across the floor to paint her toenails. Michael downloads all the songs they can find on Limewire and burns them onto a blank CD. He makes sure to burn an extra copy for Calum and then after he’s put it in the case they draw on the tops of the discs with permanent markers. After their parents have gone to bed - and David and Joy are as much Michael’s parents by this point as his own mum is - Mali drags her pillow and duvet into Calum’s room and spreads them out on the floor while the boys lie tops and tails on the bed.

They watch _Royal Tenenbaums_ on Calum’s TV and Mali straightens Michael’s hair for him. She has a proper flatiron, slim and easy to use. Michael tries his best to sit still while she drags it through his hair, only pulling away when the ceramic edge burns the back of his neck slightly. “Does this mean you’re going to write songs about boys now?” Calum wants to know. Mali hums thoughtfully, echoing the question as she moves from Michael’s hair to her own. Her hair is longer, piled on top of her head as she works at the bottom layer of it. They learned to straighten hair from watching Avril Lavigne’s music video; a month after it came out Mali had gone to the hair salon with a picture of Avril and come back with her same haircut and now she bitches about the humidity and her naturally thick, wavy hair.

“Like Calum would ever sing songs about boys,” Michael scoffs, pushing his backpack under the bed with one foot. He definitely doesn’t have a notebook full of song lyrics hidden in there amongst the pencils and crumpled-up copies of Alternative Press and Rock Sound. “We should start a proper band, though, with a drummer and everything,” he says.

Mali tips her head back, staring at him upside down. “You’d need to find one first,” she points out.

No one points out that people would not listen to a band that sings songs about boys. After _Royal Tenenbaums_ ends they watch _Monsters, Inc._ and no one points it out when Calum cries, either. In the morning life will go on as it did before. Michael feels confident that his secret is safe with Calum and Mali. Next week they’ll start school again and he will lose Calum in the afternoons, hanging around at the skatepark until he sees Joy’s station wagon wheezing its way down the main road. He’ll make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in their small, cluttered kitchen and forget to put the knife in the dishwasher, leaving it instead sticky and messy on the edge of the sink for Mali to discover when it’s her turn to do dishes. And then when he finally has to go back to his own house still and silent in the late evening, he won’t feel as alone as he used to when he slinks down the back stairs to his basement bedroom.

Michael only ever lets himself cry with headphones on. He cries in the dark in the middle of the night, without Mali or Calum there to whisper soothing words or smooth his hair back, because he doesn’t think he deserves them. After all, he’s not brave. He’s small and scared and not yet used to the four additional inches of height he’s gained over the past six months, and he’s awkward and gangly and he doesn’t think that anyone is ever going to love him. The night before school starts he lets Mali try out a bottle of Sun-In on his hair and sits under the blow dryer until she finally sighs and gives up. His hair doesn’t look any different afterward, and he thinks that maybe that’s just the way of things.

Alex Gaskarth has a girlfriend.

It doesn’t stop Michael, though, and it doesn’t stop him from writing a song about it in the middle of the night. He kisses Alex in the back of the van when theirs breaks down, after the phone call to Liz and her gentle scolding, and he tastes like Stella Artois beer that none of them can actually afford and for a while he forgets. The others pile into Louis and Zayn’s van, doubling up bunks with them as Josh drives. Michael can feel Calum silently seething as Luke lies top and tail with Louis draped in a sleeping bag and baggy sweater. He’s glad for the distraction, anyway. Alex’s fingers are cold and bony as Flyzik directs the van through the American midwest. Familiar stomping grounds for the All Time Low guys, but it’s the band’s first time touring anything besides the small cities of the east coast.

He huddles close to Alex under their shared sleeping bag in the back of the van, Alex’s hands insistent at the waistband of his jeans. Michael thinks he should maybe say something like ‘Jack is right there’ or at least ‘Stop’. Instead he shivers at the first touch of fingertips under the elastic of his boxers. They are a symphony of bitten-back moans, of careful half-glances in the afternoons and long talks into the early morning. Tonight he’s feeling particularly lonely so he eases into the touch. Sometimes he thinks the sex is secondary. He wonders why Alex does it - why when he has a beautiful girlfriend, smart and the right kind of pretty, his high school sweetheart - and then he wonders why he does it, too. There are no answers in this fifteen passenger van.

Afterward Alex hums something, some part of a song he’s working on. His hair tickles Michael’s nose; it’s too long around his ears now, his neckline, and the roots have begun to grow out from the ridiculous blond stripe dyed into it. “I miss home,” Michael comments.

“Same,” Alex admits. He leans out of the bunk crammed into the back of the van, reaches down for a notebook and pen, and scribbles something down with the pen lid clenched between his teeth. They’re too much the same. By the time he’s done his fingers are stained with ink, the pen jittering across the page with every pothole the van hits. And Alex’s underwear is sitting so low on his hips that his pubes are just barely visible beneath the waistband. Somehow it seems more obscene to Michael than the times they actually have sex.

Michael checks the time on his cell phone - too late to call home, too early to call any of his friends. He hates the melancholy times the most. “I wish I could call Mali,” he grumbles, shuffling to make room for himself in the single bed. They’re both over six feet tall, they don’t fit. And anyway Mali’s in London, doing her graduate degree, living in a flat the size of a broom closet with four other girls.

The thing he likes most about Alex is that in the early mornings he can pretend it’s someone else. He can pretend it’s another small, cramped bed and another time in his life. Tonight he doesn’t want to. He thinks about his own overgrown roots, dark underneath the shock of green hair that’s starting to mat since he hasn’t seen a shower in days. He thinks about sitting in Mali’s bathroom with foils stuck all over his head, shifting uncomfortably as she puts a grocery bag over his head and blasts hot air at his head until the skin on his scalp burns and his hair comes out yellow and crispy. They deep conditioned his hair three times in the sink and toned it violet until it came out a pale blond. The winter chill bites into him until Alex slides the notebook under his pillow and curls around him. Michael pets the dark hairs on Alex’s forearms until he’s finally tired enough to sleep without waking every time the van jostles over a bump in the road.

In the morning Alex tosses him a foil-wrapped pack of pop tarts and ruffles his hair affectionately. “Thanks,” Michael says, unfolding his legs from the van as he tumbles out the side door to take his morning shit in peace. They’re at a gas station somewhere - he’s lost track, has to ask the venue staff each night where they are - and the only clean shirt he has is the ‘Everything’s bigger in Texas’ shirt from high school. He buys a copy of Alternative Press, sure that he’s already read it. The bored-looking kid at the 7/11 counter dutifully slides the key to the mens’ room across the counter at him and sighs. “I think I’m the last one,” Michael tells the kid sympathetically.

He reads the review of their own EP and then wishes he hadn’t.

In the parking lot, Calum and Louis are playing a game of pick-up soccer when he stumbles back out into the pale sunlight. “What’s wrong,” Calum asks him automatically, letting Michael put hands on his waist and hook his chin over his shoulder. Luke is rummaging through their bags looking harangued. He finds the new pack of underwear he’s searching for still in its plastic wrapping, tucked into his duffel by a thoughtful Liz when he and Calum had been arguing over guitar picks. Later he’ll find the last twelve-pack of clean socks - all black, all ankle socks - in Michael’s bag, thrown in there by Joy equally as thoughtful but wary of Calum and Luke’s rivalry. Because they’re both too proud to ever admit what they need, the mothers pass things along silently through Michael like a kind of pact.

“I’m homesick,” Michael tells Calum. Even Calum’s hair is getting long. His armpits smell less like ass than everyone else’s, scrubbed clean in the grubby little rest stops along the way. “I miss Mali and Mum and Dad.” They’re long past the pretense of him calling David and Joy anything but that; Calum’s family is his family. Out of habit Calum’s thumb rubs against the thin little scar on his palm. It’s been there almost ten years, never faded. On Calum’s darker skin it had faded away in a matter of weeks but like Joy always tells them, Michael wears his sorrows for a long time.

Calum pokes at the fading bruise on his neck. “You can’t keep looking for home in other people,” he says. He paws at Michael’s backpack, unzipping the center pouch and pulling out the notebook. The front cover is duct taped on; that fell off somewhere in Wisconsin, Sharpied over by Zayn somewhere around Milwaukee. Michael considers telling Calum that he’s one to talk, but instead he clings like an octopus, looping his legs around Calum’s waist back to the van. Calum does not tell him that he’s too heavy - which he is - and dumps him in the middle row of seats on top of Josh, who’s asleep.

Michael nibbles on a pop tart in the back of the No Direction van while Luke drives. In the back Zayn has his sketchbook out, charcoals staining his fingers. “We’ve never been to Texas,” he mumbles to Calum once he changes his shirt. “Are we going to Texas?”

From the driver’s seat, Luke tells them both, “We’ll be in Dallas next week.” Liz has equipped him with a highlighted and sticky-noted calendar with every show, interview and acoustic set they’ve scheduled. And good, studious Luke has memorized everything for the upcoming week. He drives like a little old lady, the van creeping along and shuffling gently around holes in the road for a smooth, gentle ride across the interstate. Michael has another copy of the calendar taped to the inside of his lyrics book. The problem is he gets distracted by all the shorthand notes he’s scribbled down across the pages, tiny little chord progressions not yet turned into songs, the frantic dots of drum beats like braille on the college-ruled pages.

In the van on the way to Ohio he thinks about Alex and Lisa and how she’s probably at home right now, doing homework for her accounting courses or riding her horse or walking the dog that she and Alex got together. And then he thinks about his cock in Alex’s mouth and feels sick to his stomach. “Can we pull over?” he calls up to Luke, who doesn’t question his need to vomit at barely noon on the side of the road. It’s Luke who rubs his back as he pukes up everything in his stomach - the alcohol, the half-digested pop tart, everything - and Calum who digs a clean shirt out of their merch bins in the trailer for him. It’s too small for him and rides up every time he shifts, exposing an uncomfortably large slice of skin at his back. Alex wolf-whistles when they clamber out of the van later at the venue for load-in.

“Nice shirt,” he says, hooking his thumbs in Michael’s belt loops.

He frowns when Michael leans away from the touch. “I’ll see you later, yeah?” Michael tells him, hurrying off to help Luke with the heavy totes full of t-shirts before he can change his mind. The plastic handles dig into his fingers in the most painful way and Vinny wraps him in a bear hug at the merch table, helps them zip-tie the display up to the wire frame and folds t-shirts like nobody’s business. Then Luke leaves him at the merch tables alone to go over the set changes that night with Evan; Calum is nowhere to be seen, probably hotboxing the bathroom with Louis and Zayn. With a sigh Michael digs in the bins and sets up the other display for Josh - he’s arguing with Rian about time signatures and now does not seem the time to interrupt.

Which, he now realizes, leaves him defenseless at merch once Vinny leaves - presumably to get drunk in a corner somewhere - and Alex corners him up against the table. “It’s later,” Alex tells him cheekily. He flicks his long, blond-highlighted fringe and blinks at Michael with his deep chocolate brown eyes. He’s not attractive, Alex, with his bushy caterpillar eyebrows and barely-there lips. Neither of them are - Michael knows he’s not, eyes too close together and deep-set, mouth small and grumpy-looking even when he smiles. The only difference is that he’s done pretending he’s not weird-looking and gangly.

Or maybe Michael’s just trying to convince himself because he’s stuck on every-color-but-brown eyes and secondhand jeans rolled at the ankle pretending to be stylish when actually they’re too short. Over low-top Converse with the laces tucked under the tongues of the shoes, no socks, but never smelling of feet. Alex is wearing flip-flops with his skinny jeans, ugly feet poking out in plain sight. Michael hates his hairy toes but takes Alex’s hands anyway and - after checking to make sure no one is looking - leans over the table for a kiss. He holds onto Alex’s hands and kisses back, the wet darting kind that reminds him of high school girls, pulling away nervously before anyone can see.

Later, before the show, Michael shaves in the men’s room in front of a dimly lit mirror. He’s got a dull razor and it leaves several cuts on his chin that bleed for a long time - not getting enough iron, he can practically hear Liz scolding him - but he’ll be damned if they get to the east coast and he’s still leaving beard burn on Alex’s cheeks for Lisa to see. Afterward he splashes cold water on his face and supposes that will have to do. “War wounds?” Luke asks him in the dressing room, poking at his jaw. Michael rolls his eyes and rubs a finger over the downy blond hairs sprouting up along Luke’s jawline. They’re too pale and sparse to bother with shaving.

“Something like that,” Michael tells him. He helps Calum restring his bass and tunes his guitars, strumming something of a melody to himself and writing the chords on the back of his hand in Sharpie so he won’t forget them between warm-ups and playing their set and signing by the merch table and behind the venue later. He knows himself well enough to know that he’ll get distracted by Alex’s hand in his back pocket. It’s something he struggles with about himself; when Calum comes back from the loading dock hanging onto Louis and giggling he smells of sweat and weed, the smell clinging to his clothes and hair.

He doesn’t miss the hurt look when Calum’s chin hooks over his shoulder a split second before Luke mumbles some excuse about calling Liz and walks away. “What’s his problem?” Calum asks.

“If you haven’t figured it out by now then I’m not going to tell you,” Michael tells him. He leaves Calum on the sagging couch in the dressing room and goes to find Luke, eager to speak to Liz himself. When he finds Luke he’s doing his trademark pace-and-talk with his crappy Nokia in one hand, fiddling with the brim of his snapback with the other. “Let me talk to Liz,” he whines, again and again until Luke huffs and hands him the cell phone. “Hi, mum,” Michael says cheerfully. “Miss you.”

On the other end of the crackling, popping phone line, Liz says, “Hi, sweetie! Tell me you’re keeping out of trouble. Are you brushing your teeth enough?” and the motherly things she scolds him about are so normal it roots him in place as he fends off her accusations of poor oral hygiene - well, he hasn’t been flossing and his toothbrush got lost somewhere in Colorado - and assures her that they’ve got enough clean underwear to last through the end of the month. They haven’t, but he’s not about to tell their band mum that or she’ll have a conniption. At the end of their conversation, Liz goes, “Okay, love, now pass me back to my son,” and Michael leaves Luke to talk to his mum by himself, feeling infinitely better than he had before.

The thing with Alex didn’t happen on purpose.

But now he’s stuck in it until the end of tour, and he doesn’t know what to do. “What’m I going to do, Lou,” he moans, flopping down into Louis’ lap in No Direction’s dressing room. And perhaps asking Louis wasn’t the best idea he’s ever had, considering that their friendship started out on a similar vein. “I’m helping a guy cheat on his girlfriend, how fucked up is that?”

“I think the bigger question is how fucked up is it that he’s leading her on and sleeping with you when he’s got a massive hard-on for his best friend?” Louis points out. He smells of menthol cigarettes and rye; it’s a comforting sort of smell, the reminder of their first solo tour sharing a van and sleeping in the back, the little spoon amid the piled-up backpacks and bins of unsold merch despite having almost six inches on Louis. And out of habit Louis’ hands slide up under his t-shirt, rubbing knuckles against his sides roughly. Michael lets his breath out in a little huff, pressing his nose against Louis’ neck tattoos. “You’ve got to break it off with him then, love.”

And that’s not the answer he was looking for. He groans, frustrated, and says, “But that’s the shitty part! I still want to be his friend. I just… don’t want to help him cheat on his girlfriend. I don’t want to be this, like, weird gay tour hookup.”

Louis pats his head sympathetically. “That’s the way these things go sometimes,” he says. He shrugs, tracing patterns along the underside of Michael’s arm. One day Michael will be as covered in tattoos as Louis and Zayn. For now he lets Louis trace patterns on his arm with a Sharpie, watches as the ink bleeds into his skin and spreads until the design is illegible and smudged. They sit there until they can’t anymore, until Josh and Luke and Flyzik come to summon them for soundcheck, Luke looking harried and tired. His hair’s damp from the shower - and Michael feels guilty about that, that Luke always gets the last shower under the tepid trickle from the rusty shower heads in these crappy, hole-in-the-wall places.

Soundcheck is over as quickly as it began, just making sure that all of their equipment works before doors. Michael stands with Calum beside the stage during No Direction’s set - Luke having drawn the short straw for merch duty before their set - and watches Louis and Zayn bop around the stage, playing their instruments aggressively and growling into the microphones as Josh smashes his drums. They’re a good band, honestly, and it breaks Michael’s heart knowing that they’ll never find mainstream success because Louis writes songs about boys and fervently refuses to change the pronouns in his lyrics to appeal to sad fourteen year old girls with skinny jeans and emo glasses. They’ll get the odd interview in the back pages of Alternative Press, or a pull-out poster in Rock Sound, because Zayn’s got those pretty eyes and his bisexuality is edgy and cool for the papers. It’s a completely different kind of energy than their own set; more aggressive and raw, less interactive than All Time Low’s sets generally are. Michael leans against Luke for the rest of the set, chin digging into the blond’s shoulder. He’s still getting used to Luke being taller than he used to be. When they first met Luke was this tiny thing and now he’s all tall and, like, manly.

“Stop getting so tall,” he tells Luke. “I’m supposed to be the tallest member of the band.”

Luke shrugs and picks at the sleeve of his t-shirt. “What can I say,” he says wryly, “I’m a late bloomer. Just be thankful I smoke so many cigarettes or I’d be unstoppable.” He scratches below his armpit in a lazy, practiced gesture, annoyed and impatient to make the itch stop. There are a pair of drumsticks tucked into the back of his shorts, poking Michael in the belly. Predictably, the crowd roars, frenzied, as the other three run offstage covered in a thin sheen of sweat. Michael grabs his guitar out of its case and makes sure it’s plugged in, pops in his in-ear monitors with a wince - he really should’ve taken Alex up on his offer to get the custom-fitted ones, he thinks - and then in a matter of minutes they’re running onstage and launching straight into ‘Kiss Me’.

He also thinks, by the time he’s gotten comfortable under the hot lights, that he should have done some vocal warm-ups. It’s not their best set by a long shot - his voice feels like he’s just deep-throated a sailboat - but he makes it through until the end only a little bit hoarse, swinging the mic stand around when it feels like his voice gets too thin and reedy to let the crowd sing ‘Unpredictable’ back at them. And it still gives Michael goosebumps every time he hears his own lyrics coming out of people’s mouths. There’s a unique joyfulness to it, knowing that anybody thinks the way he feels is worthwhile, that the things he has to say are worth singing back.

As soon as they get offstage after, Calum corners him by the vending machines and goes, “What the fuck is wrong with your voice?” He’s sweaty and his fringe is plastered to his forehead and having Calum’s arms there bracketing him in only makes him feel sweatier. “You were so off tonight, man, what happened?” And Michael knows better than to argue, lets his best friend have a go at him and just stands there taking it until Calum runs out of words and pulls him into a tight, tense hug, mumbling apologies against his cheek. It’s not about the set at all - they both know what it’s about - but they’ll pretend that it’s that out of loyalty to Calum. Blood brothers, Michael thinks, rubbing his scarred palm against Calum’s shoulder.

“You need a shower,” Michael tells Calum simply, opting to skip his own shower so he can try and bully Luke into taking up some of the hot water. “I’m going to merch,” he decides. It’s not his night to hustle t-shirts, he knows, but he could use the distraction to take his mind off things. When he gets to the booth at the back Luke is happy to see him and Vinny is not. “Go shower,” Michael whisper-shouts in Luke’s ear. “I’ve got merch, go take a hot shower for once.” And Vinny’s smile is all tight-lipped venom as he sells brightly colored t-shirts with the band’s logo on them and Michael chats to basically whoever comes up to his side of the merch booth. The only people who come up are the ones who come to buy the headliner’s t-shirt, slip Vinny a phone number and tell him that Alex is ‘sooo hawt’.

Yeah, Michael knows. He tries not to feel vindictive about it as he counts the handful of crumpled bills at the end of the night as people filter out of the venue, has to count it three times to account for the fact that American money is all the same fuckin’ color. They’ve made fifty-four dollars on top of their cut of ticket sales. So they’ll have enough money to gas up the van and get Taco Bell for dinner. His stomach growls, hungry for something other than ninety-nine cent tacos and Mountain Dew Baja Blast. In the middle of the night he’ll be bitter about not taking a shower but once they’ve finished with the load-out and he slumps into the van - it’s Calum’s turn for night driving duty - he pulls Luke into a cuddle and presses his face into the damp blond hair that smells of Axe body wash.

Luke comes after.

Mali finally saves up the money to buy a new car - which is actually not new, it’s a late nineties reject with a squealing accessory belt - and she drives Calum over to Michael’s house one Friday to show off. She’s got a pair of fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror, an air freshener shaped like a dolphin, Hilary Duff too loud over the car speakers. The bass thumps under the seats and vibrates up into his skull sitting in the backseat huddled together with Calum; even though it’s embarrassing and he’d absolutely die if anyone heard them, they all three shout the words to ‘So Yesterday’ out the windows as they drive out of the suburbs toward downtown. When the song ends, he leans into Calum and goes, “If you ever tell anyone I know the words to that song I’m friendship breaking up with you.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Calum tells him, leaning over the front seats of the car to change out the CD. He puts in Good Charlotte’s latest release instead, turns the volume up and the bass down a little. No point in blowing Mali’s speakers out on the first day she owns the damn thing. They go through the drive-thru at McDonald’s and eat in the car, chuck their trash out the window along the highway where there’s only dust and busted tire debris to catch them littering. And they go to the beach for a little while - Mali’s a fast driver, quick reflexes and impatient at traffic lights - while it’s warm and sunny on a Saturday afternoon. Michael kicks his shoes off and leaves them in the backseat.

He’s not thinking about the last time he came to this particular stretch of beach. He won’t; he won’t allow himself to think about it. Instead he links arms with both siblings and they walk along the shore, surf lapping at their ankles as they splash through the low tide. “So what now, little brothers?” Mali asks, shielding her eyes from the sun with one hand. “Are you ever going to play another gig or am I supposed to be the only talented one in this family?

Calum squawks at her angrily and reaches across Michael’s chest to slap at her furiously. “We will play other gigs,” he says indignantly, trying to shove his sister into the water. “As soon as lame-ass over here pulls his head out of his ass and stops mooning over a boy who dumped him. Write a song about it or something,” and then he’s shoving at Michael, too, only Michael’s all elbows and knees and goes toppling face-first into the salt water. By the time he’s righted himself and spluttered out all the water he swallows, Calum is already halfway down the beach laughing at him.

“I am not mooning,” he protests when he finally makes his way down the beach, shorts sticking to his legs where they rub painfully against his inner thighs.

And Calum squints at him suspiciously but says nothing. “You’ve been acting a little bit emo,” Mali states. Her hair is streaming behind her like a banner in the wind; she had been Michael’s first crush, back before he fully understood what crushes meant and long before he’d ever considered that he might want to kiss another guy. She wraps him in a hug despite his wet clothes and presses a kiss to his temple, tells him, “I’m glad you’re better now.”

It doesn’t occur to him until they’re in the car on their way back from the beach that this might have been a kidnapping. He’s expecting to turn off beside the church with the tall bell tower that marks their sad little decaying suburb, but instead Mali breezes past the exit towards the downtown core. “Where are we going?” he asks. No one answers him; he sits sullen and dripping in the backseat, trying to wring out his t-shirt. “Where are we going,” he asks again, prodding the back of Calum’s neck with one fingertip sullenly. He had already been feeling weird about being at the beach - he’s never much liked it there during the daylight since he’s prone to sunburns and he’s afraid of being stung by a stingray - and maybe that had distracted him some. It’s not like he thinks about it constantly.

And anyway he’s sore about the band thing - Calum’s supposed to be going to some camp for football, leaving him alone for an entire month - because they haven’t really played anything since their last gig. He hasn’t even wanted to play his guitar really, except in the middle of the night when he’s paralyzed by that can’t breathe, can’t sleep feeling that ends with him staring at Ashton’s Myspace profile strumming along to Brand New and singing under his breath with it. The words still feel like knives, pricking over his soft uncertain feelings until they’re something bitter and unrecognizable. So he shifts uncomfortably in the backseat, hyperaware of the fact that he’s leaving a wet mark on the upholstery of Mali’s new car.

They pull up in front of the dilapidated community center on the edge of downtown - the one with crumbling red brick walls and a single door with a plywood ramp attached to the stoop, nailed down so it can’t be stolen - and Mali announces, “We’re here,” and looks at Calum meaningfully. Almost as though they’ve planned it, they both get out of the car at the same moment and circle around to the passenger side. Calum opens the back door and pulls at Michael until he slides across the seats, digging his heels in to avoid being made to get out of the vehicle. The engine’s running, anyway - if he moves fast enough he could lunge over the front seats and drive away without them. Technically it would be grand theft auto, but it also sounds ten times more appealing than whatever weird social torture Calum and Mali have in store for him.

“We figured it would probably help if you talked to other people going through the same stuff as you,” Mali tells him. And he goggles at her, confused, as they march him down the corridor to the back of the building. What is he supposed to be going through that’s so awful he’s getting dumped off at a fuckin’ support group? Like, he’s got greasy skin and kind of a bad haircut, but that’s not the end of the world.

A moment too late he recognizes the flag hanging in the back window of the stuffy little room they’ve shepherded him into, and Calum helpfully chimes in with, “You know, gay stuff,” and pats him on the shoulder magnanimously.

Michael shuffles away from the touch feeling caged-in and betrayed and spends five minutes after he’s greeted by the over-enthusiastic and over-plucked group coordinator dodging promises that the other kids will arrive soon. Once he’s sat down on one of the sagging couches that look like they’ve been plucked straight from the seventies, Calum and Mali leave him there with promises that they’ll pick him up after the movie they’re going to see. And then he feels doubly betrayed because he has to go sit through some shitty group and they’re off without him doing something fun. Also, what if Ashton shows up? He might actually die if that happens.

On the other hand, the group coordinator offers him cookies and juice which turn out to be surprisingly good. A handful of sullen, awkward-looking teenagers with similarly shitty haircuts trickle in and they start the uncomfortable introductions part of the evening. “I’m Michael,” he says when his turn comes around. “I don’t really know what else to say, I’m not really - I’m in a band? Well, kind of a band, we’re like pretty bad, so…” he trails off, making eye contact with the ground. The program coordinator leads them into a discussion about safer sex practices and he sits stock-still on his side of the couch and learns more than he’d ever wanted to know about different types of condoms and dental dams. A bowl gets passed around with cheap condoms and these tiny pocket-sized tubes of lube; everyone else in the group takes some so Michael takes some, stuffs them into his still-damp shorts pocket and wants to slither into a corner and die.

He can’t say that he’s ever been more relieved when the first hour passes and they break for ‘fresh air’ - meaning that, like, half the group flocks outside to stand around looking despondent while they smoke cheap cigarettes - and Michael decides that he’ll go in the opposite direction, try to sneak out since he obviously doesn’t belong there. But the back door doesn’t open when he pushes the door bar. Frustrated, he kicks at it and his toes glance off the door stopper.

Just as he’s about to let an impressive string of curses out, he hears laughter from behind him. He pauses, tries the door again as a desperate escape attempt. “Try the other door,” he hears. “That one’s always locked. If you’re trying to sneak out, I mean.”

“I wasn’t trying to,” Michael argues. He leans against the door, studying his would-be rescuer. It’s the scrawny blond kid who hadn’t said much in the group session, mumbled his name and then shoved his hands into his pockets, hood up and earbuds in. Blond kid is wearing a huge, oversized hoodie despite the heat wave that’s been making everyone crawl out of his skin. For a second Michael considers whether this kid is actually more hardcore than him, eyes his cutoff jean shorts and flip-flops wearily, and… “Okay,” he says. “Since you’re such an expert at escaping this place, lead the way.”

The blond kid shows him how to open the lock on the other side of the double doors and leads him out beside the dumpster. “I’m Luke, by the way,” blond kid tells him, suddenly small and uncertain as he fishes a crumpled pack of cigarettes out of his back pocket and lights up. “You want one?”

Not wanting to seem lame, Michael accepts one even though he doesn’t smoke. He has never smoked, not really. One time he got high with Calum and the rest of the footie team, but even that had him sputtering and coughing and everyone had laughed as he threw up into someone’s bushes. He still puts the cigarette between his lips and holds it there while he struggles with the lighter. After he’s sparked a flame and lit the cigarette - it’s surprisingly hot and acrid in his mouth, he doesn’t know what he had expected - he admits, “I don’t do this much. Uh, the… the group thing.”

“I didn’t figure,” Luke tells him. He does this cool thing with his lips and tongue, blows a smoke ring, and Michael thinks that that’s a good trick. Vaguely he wonders what else Luke could do like that, experimentally, but the thought feels hollow and lifeless. But Luke doesn’t laugh when he doubles over coughing halfway through the cigarette and has to stub it out with his toes, doesn’t laugh when he tears up and has to rub at his eyes furiously.

Michael asks, “So why are you here then? I mean, if you’re just going to sneak out halfway through.”

They’re standing close enough that the edges of Luke’s flip-flops overlap with the toes of his shoes slightly. “I have to show up, for therapy,” Luke explains, one eyebrow cocked up in a defiant gesture, like, daring Michael to question it or call him crazy, maybe. “So I show up long enough for attendance to get taken and then I sneak out. It works,” he says, taking another drag off his cigarette and holding the smoke in his lungs a moment before exhaling long and slow into Michael’s face. He keeps doing that like it’s something significant, only Michael doesn’t know what it means.

“You keep doing that,” he complains. “Are you trying to be an asshole on purpose or something?” Out of habit he picks at a scab on the back of his elbow. He doesn’t remember what it’s from; probably skateboarding, probably after he’d tried to land that kickflip and bailed out hard enough to give himself a nosebleed.

Luke rolls his eyes. “It means I think you’re hot,” he says flatly. He flicks his fringe back and shoves the arms of his hoodie up, suddenly all hard attitude and closed-off body language. Michael assesses the situation; Luke’s not bad-looking and he’s clearly no stranger to developing incredibly reckless habits. Maybe they can be each other’s next mistake. Just like that the decision seems to be cemented. Luke goes, “Wanna make out?” and Michael nods, and just like that they’re making out against the dumpster.

It doesn’t mean anything. They stay there and skip the second hour of group, sharing cigarettes and making out. By the time Calum and Mali roll up to the curb to pick him up afterward, his mouth feels bruised and he’s jittery, restless with unresolved sexual tension. He’s not sure whether he likes Luke or not, if he’s just a pleasant distraction to pass the time, but when Calum asks him “How was it?” as he slides into the backseat he doesn’t say anything.

“Fine, I guess,” he says with a shrug.

Casual, nonchalant, not like he made out with a strange, scrawny blond kid beside a dumpster and smoked cigarettes or anything. He’s pretty sure his clothes smell like smoke; he’s pretty sure everyone knows it, too, judging by the knowing look that passes between Calum and Mali. They stop at his house on the way home long enough for him to get a change of clothes, his skateboard, and then they stay up late watching Simpsons reruns until he falls asleep sandwiched between them in a pile of old blankets.

When he thinks about it later - he wakes up too hot under the covers when it’s still dark outside, TV flickering blue light over the whole living room - he doesn’t ache as much as he used to. It’s not the same, though. Ashton fit vaguely into the jigsaw puzzle of his life; he was a known quantity, something that maybe someday Michael could have figured out all the answers to, but that rug has been pulled out from under his feet and he’s running out of poorly worded metaphors to describe his feelings. He’s getting ahead of himself with his thoughts again. He doesn’t know if this thing with Luke was a one-time thing, if there are expectations of him now. After almost an hour of tossing and turning and staring at infomercials for bra inserts and control-top pantyhose he resigns himself to another sleepless night and pulls his notebook out of his backpack. It’s harder to write in the dark. He’s almost sure that when he reads these lyrics over in the morning he’ll be embarrassed by himself, but maybe they’re good enough to show Calum.

Michael doesn’t give much thought to the youth group after he’s been to it. He tries his best to put it out of his mind as a one-off; he had confronted Calum and Mali about it the next day and they’d had an uncomfortable conversation about boundaries. It had ended with apologies and hugs - and in Calum’s case their increasingly more complicated secret handshake - and Michael had gone on to complain about how much he hates socializing with new people afterward. They had meant well by it, though, and he’s never been the type to hold a grudge for very long. Things go back very much to the way they were before: Calum goes to footie practice after school in preparation for his camp thing coming up, and after school Michael goes over to hang out with Mali when she comes home from college. A few days go by in the blink of an eye.

He’s sitting on Mali’s bed cross-legged when he checks his Myspace account. It’s been a few days for that, too. Not that he’s been in a funk, exactly - more like a lack of the will to care about anything. He logs on, planning to fill out a few of the bullshit surveys that everyone passes around, when he sees the new friend request notification. There are always new friend notifications; he’s a little Myspace famous because he’s in a band, because he knows what angles to hold the expensive digital camera his mum bought him for Christmas above his head at. He knows how to work his angles. And he’s a little afraid that he has a serious case of Myspace angles. If he did, no one would say anything. No one wants to be the one who has to tell their friend that they’re only attractive looking at them from a certain angle and direction. The trackball on the laptop is slow and stuttery. He clicks on the friend request and accepts it without bothering to look at the profile.

There are only so many clashing backgrounds and fonts sprinkled with glitter text that his eyes can take, after all. “Popularity is such a joke,” he sighs. He does not type backslash and then he definitely does not type the rest of Ashton’s URL. Mali takes no notice of his mood’s steep downward descent, too distracted by straightening her hair - an ongoing daily battle - and shaking her ass to Destiny’s Child. Which Michael doesn’t enjoy, mostly, and if his foot is tapping to the beat a little it must be a nervous tic of his. He flicks his fringe out of his eyes, rolls the skin on the inside of his lip between his teeth anxiously. It’s a different song on Ashton’s profile, now. Michael doesn’t know if he’s relieved or heartbroken. He should change his too, but none of the songs have the correct amount of vitriol and ‘I still love you’ in them, respectively. “I hate this stupid website,” he complains.

“You poor thing,” Mali tells him, frowning at a section of hair that remains stubbornly wavy instead of pin-straight. “Some people have real problems.”

He rolls his eyes and turns back to the computer screen. “How am I supposed to get a record deal if no one in this stupid town plays drums,” he whines, clicking on a new bulletin survey a little too aggressively for the little red trackball in the center of the keyboard to keep up with. “No one wants to listen to a band that doesn’t have a drummer.” The downloads in Mali’s Limewire are stuck persistently at twenty-eight percent. Michael doesn’t even know if the songs he’s downloading are legitimate, or if it’s going to turn out to be some asshole making cat noises vaguely to the tune of the song again.

“Make Calum learn drums then,” Mali says. “The White Stripes make do without a bassist, they’re not that important. No one would even notice!” Michael doesn’t bring up the moral quandary with that suggestion - namely, that the White Stripes’ original gimmick was that the lady Stripe and the dude Stripe were allegedly siblings, only then it came out in the press that they were actually married and playing at incest. He’s pretty sure that Meg White is only there to add visual appeal to the band, anyway. The guy from the White Stripes is about as homely as they come.

Still, he says, “I’m not telling people that Calum is my brother and I’m definitely not marrying him,” though they both know he only means the second part. He’s never really felt like an only child, exactly. How can he, when he’s got this wonderful second family to make up for the shortcomings of his first? Mali flops on the bed beside him, stomach to the mattress. She reaches over his arms in true oldest child fashion and commandeers the laptop, navigating to Neopets where they wait for the images to load pixel by excruciating pixel. Michael would make fun of her for being nineteen and being on a website for nine year olds, but he has an account on there too. Just for the games. The shitty, slow to load Flash games that he can get on the school computers on the slow-as-balls dialup when he doesn’t feel like going to class, which is often. He’s been afraid to skip class in his usual places lately in case he sees Ashton, in case they run into each other in the empty halls and have nothing to say to each other besides an awkward ‘Hey’. Michael doesn’t think his heart could handle that just yet.

Calum arrives home in his usual cloud of dust and grass-stained knees, having caught a ride home with one of the footie lads’ mums. “I’m knackered,” he announces, throwing himself mud and all across Michael’s lap. At least this time he has had the decency to kick his cleats off at the front door. His hair is plastered to his forehead by sweat. Michael rakes his fingers through it anyway, scratching his nails absentmindedly at the base of Calum’s skull. Calum chatters for a bit about how practice had gone - the same as every other footie practice since the beginning of time, practically - and then once he’s run himself out of breath he excuses himself to take a shower. Without having to move a muscle Michael knows that Calum has stripped out of his grotty shorts and jersey right in the hallway and left his socks and shin pads on top of the pile; he imagines stink lines wavering up from the heap of discarded clothes like in cartoons. He hears the groan and shudder of the pipes delivering the last of the hot water into the shower, knows the exact second the hot water tank has run out and then to the exact millisecond when Calum will holler, “Mali!” at the top of his lungs and storm out of the bathroom in just a towel, dripping wet and pissed off.

“Oops,” Mali says, still clicking away at Destruct-o-match with a ferocity that only college students can muster. “Did I use all the hot water?” And out of habit she ducks as Calum throws a sweaty shin pad at her head; luckily for her, Calum has shit aim. Michael half-heartedly shoves at her shoulder on his way to Calum’s room out of a sense of loyalty.

“… never any hot water in this fucking house,” Calum’s muttering darkly under his breath as he stands in front of his bureau, bare-ass naked. Michael clears his throat and averts his eyes, making very solid eye contact with the Ja Rule poster on the wall until Calum is decent. At least Calum has finally surpassed his wannabe rapper phase a bit - he’s stopped wearing the plaster on his face all the time, probably because someone told him it looked stupid - and instead he’s taken to gelling his hair until it’s standing in stiff little peaks across his forehead as it grows out. It kind of reminds Michael of a ski slope.

They go to the skate park instead of doing a proper band practice. Calum sits by the fence and works on the history paper he has that’s two weeks overdue and Michael thinks guiltily about his own that he hasn’t written and has no intention of writing. He’d drop out of school in a heartbeat if he could. Both his own mother and Calum’s parents have told him that it’s school until he graduates and he can do whatever he wants, or he can drop out and find a job and an apartment which he’ll have to pay for on his own. Dropping out seems less appealing when actual responsibilities come attached to it. Michael’s working on his grinding technique when he sees Ashton walking through the subdivision with both siblings in tow and it feels like all the air’s been punched out of his lungs. He bails hard, arms flailing uselessly by his side as he skids face-first to the bottom of the bowl. When he picks himself up both forearms are torn up and bleeding slightly.

There used to be a time when Ashton would be there with a plaster for him and some encouraging words when he fell flat on his ass. Michael misses that a lot, quite honestly. Now it just stings to see his back retreating past the evenly spaced street lights without even a backwards glance. “You okay?” Calum asks, hastily shoving his schoolwork into his backpack as Michael shuffles dejectedly toward the fence. His eyes go wide at the sight of Michael’s mangled forearms.

“I’m fine,” Michael lies. They don’t feel that bad; maybe heartbreak is an effective anesthetic against pain. He lets Joy patch him up anyway, withering slightly under her motherly barrage of concern and scolding. “It’s just a scrape,” he says as she cleans his arms. “Seriously, it’s not a big deal, just leave it.”

Joy tsks at him and frowns. “If you don’t keep them clean you’ll get gangrene and then we will have to cut off your arms,” she tells him. She’s only half-joking, he thinks.

Calum pulls a face, lurking in the doorway like he does every time Michael fucks up and injures himself somehow. “You can’t jerk off if you have stumps for arms,” he says solemnly, and then instinctively ducks out of the reach of his mother’s slipper when she reaches to smack him with it. Michael sticks his tongue out and allows Joy to finish bandaging him up, but inside his chest feels hollow and he kind of wants everyone to leave him alone. He wants to go home and sit in his bedroom at his crappy desktop computer and stalk Ashton’s Myspace all night. Instead of doing that he has his regular movie night with Mali and Calum. He doesn’t know if anyone notices that he has been quieter than usual lately.

His breaking point comes at three in the morning when everyone else is asleep and he just can’t seem to manage it himself. He reaches for Mali’s laptop and logs into his Myspace and just stares at Ashton’s bland white profile for a while wondering what he did wrong. It feels like he doesn’t have the right to be upset since they were never properly dating. Running on jagged emotions he makes a status update that just says ‘Fuck high school romances’ and posts it before he can change his mind. When he’s gone back to his own page he has a new message waiting for him. Figuring it’s probably just another of those ‘Hey, check out our band!’ things he clicks it and instead finds that it’s a message from Luke, of youth group infamy. It’s somehow more welcome than an unsolicited screamo band assaulting his ears so he responds immediately, only stopping to wonder after he’s sent it if that will make him look too eager or something. He doesn’t exactly know the rules for interacting with boys he’s kind of made out with.

They make plans to hang out at the mall and it seems like a painfully teenage thing to do. Calum will be at practice all afternoon and Mali has some study group thing at the college, so it’s not like there’s anything else for him to do. Or maybe that’s the excuse he’s giving himself because he doesn’t know how to feel about going. It feels disloyal to Ashton for him to go out with this other guy even if it’s not a date, which is stupid since they were never dating and even if they were they’re definitely broken up now. Michael wonders if it will ever stop feeling weird again, if he’s ever going to get over his first love.

The first time they meet Louis, Zayn and Josh they’re actually late getting to the venue thanks to a customs snafu and one of their suitcases getting lost at Heathrow. As a result, they won’t arrive at the first venue until it’s almost too late to load in and soundcheck. Michael is crabby after a flight spent shifting restlessly and pacing between their seats and the tiny, cramped toilet to stretch his aching legs. He envies Calum and Luke, who had both spent the entire time sleeping soundly. As much as he loves touring - could do it his whole life, he thinks, being away from home for long stretches at a time - he hates the physical toll on his body, the ache in his legs, the bags under his eyes. They eat like shit most nights, although when they have Liz on tour with them they eat better.

It’s sometimes strange having a parent on the road. They’re on their first ever tour outside of Australia and it is cold and rainy as they shuttle between London and the first nowhere towns in the United Kingdom, sharing the driving in shifts with Liz - who’s still obligated to come along since Luke is technically a minor still despite being of legal drinking age in Europe. It’s crappy dive bars and all-ages clubs, but the kids who come to their shows will know the words and they’ll sing along. A minor revelation is had every night when Michael’s voice inevitably gives out for a minute and the crowd carries the song for him tunelessly. He can’t believe that people know his songs. He can’t believe No Direction are taking them on tour, either. It feels like they’ve been plucked out of real life and put into a fairytale - not for the first time, he has to pinch himself to remind himself that this is his real life and not a dream.

He’s sitting in the passenger seat while Liz drives. Calum and Luke are asleep in the back seat and, like always, he can’t sleep. “Stop grinding your teeth,” Liz tells him.

“Can’t help it,” he says, fumbling with the controls for the radio in their crappy rental van. He’s anxious - too anxious - to get to the venue, to meet the other bands properly, because talking on Myspace and through AIM doesn’t feel the same to him as a face-to-face connection. He can’t even fumble with his cell phone; they haven’t got a phone plan for the UK so it will be mostly pay phone calls to home, bad connections and dropped calls and the operator voice asking to insert more coins when they’ve run clean out of pocket change. It’s better with Liz on tour with them. Instead of grinding his teeth he takes to chewing the inside of his lip instead. Liz sighs at him but says nothing, only asks him where the turn-off is a while later. Everyone is on edge. Michael hates being late. It feels like he’s stale from the flight. All the sitting really gets to him, but with any luck he’ll be able to take a whore’s bath in the sink before the show.

They pull up behind the venue and Michael leans over the back of his seat to wake his bandmates. Calum wakes up first, making a truly godawful noise, and stares blankly at him for a moment. “Five more minutes,” he pleads.

Liz opens the sliding door of the van and goes, “You’ve slept enough for all four of us. Time to get moving, chop chop!” And Luke predictably startles himself awake, falls half off the cheap upholstery, and stumbles out of the van after his mother. Michael follows behind them, followed by Calum, and all told he’s sure they look like a row of ducklings following after their mother. Liz quickly takes to delegating the work between them and the few scuzzy roadies who show up, handing off guitar cases and stacks and plastic bins full of cords. It’s hard to tell who belongs to whom for a while as everyone rallies to load them in hurriedly before doors. Stuff like this continues to warm Michael’s heart; he’d been afraid that the longer they were on the road, the more cynical and removed from it all he would become, but so far it’s felt like it’s the opposite. Most days he feels like there’s an outpouring of gratitude rolling off of him.

And secretly part of him is glad for the delay. They get to fast-forward the awkward ‘getting to know you’ stuff because there is a job to do; he sits down in a corner with his guitars and tunes them up, partly due to the humidity and partly because they’d had to loosen the tuning on all their instruments before the flights. So there he is with his tuner and his capo in his hoodie pocket trying to get the D string to do what he wants when he hears this voice go, “Mate, I’ve got it,” and someone takes the guitar from him and tunes it effortlessly in a blur of tattooed fingers and he sits on his stool, absolutely stunned. “There ya go,” his savior in ripped denim says. “Louis, by the way,” he says, only he says it the French way, ‘Lou-ee’ instead of like ‘Lewis’ the way they do when they’re all picking on Luke.

“Yeah,” Michael says hollowly. “Cool, I’m Mike? From Myspace?” The words fall out of his mouth so lamely he wants to cringe. Because of course Louis knows who he is; asked him on tour, didn’t he? and he wants to melt into the floor and disappear. “Sorry,” he says, voice suddenly an octave higher due to embarrassment. “That was the lamest introduction ever, Christ, it’s been a long day.” There’s also the nagging embarrassment filed away at the back of his head that he’s been pronouncing Louis’ name wrong this whole time. The jet lag is starting to catch up with him; he really wishes he’d slept, or at least eaten something. He rubs the back of his neck awkwardly, catches himself grinding his teeth again and winces.

The other thing that’s surprising to him is how much shorter Louis was in person. He and Calum - and even Luke - have grown so tall that he just assumes most guys are around his same height. Which means that Zayn and Josh are on just this side of average height, or - fuck, he’s making himself sick trying to do the mental math - well, sometimes Zayn looks taller… “I’m shorter in person, I know,” Louis says long-sufferingly. “But I swear I make up for it in other areas.” He laughs at his own joke, a full-bellied laugh that reverberates through the small room they’ve stowed all their gear in. When Michael doesn’t laugh along, he frowns and goes, “Fuck, you lot are jet-lagged to hell, aren’t you?” Michael nods mutely, absorbed in the task of setting his guitars in the rack alongside Calum’s. When he’s done Louis takes him by the wrist and says, grandly, “Come on, mate, let’s get you fixed up before doors.”

He won’t meet Zayn and Josh properly, not until after the show. But for now Louis drags him to the bar and grabs them both a Red Bull - which tastes like shit as Michael chugs it, burning at the back of his throat, makes him want to gag - and they sit on barstools and chase the energy drinks with a pint each. When he’s on his second Red Bull, Michael goes, “These taste like fuckin’ drain cleaner,” and pulls a face. It feels like being jolted awake, but he supposes it’s better to be manic and tacky with sweat than groggy and stumbling around onstage.

“Pretty sure they’re made with the same stuff,” Louis tells him after he’s drained the tall can completely. His knowing smirk says that he knows the taste well enough to be reveling in Michael’s discomfort. They piss the time away between soundcheck and doors drinking - Liz is hovering and looking disapproving but there’s nothing she can say since the drinking age in Europe is sixteen - and some of the frantic energy he’s been building up dissipates. The crowd isn’t great for them that first night. Time passes in a blur; between the alcohol and the energy drinks and the general sense of somewhere else-ness that comes with being in a new place, Michael considers himself lucky for not vomiting all over the stage.

It’s his night for merch so he watches No Direction’s set from the back of the venue, in between digging through boxes for the right sized t-shirts and staring pleadingly at the emo kids ducking out early for a smoke to put a dollar in their tip jar. Even from the back their set is phenomenal - the band explodes onto the stage and maintains the same level of manic excitement through the entire forty-minute set - and Michael wishes he could be in the pit for it. Sometimes he misses the feeling of bodies crashing into him from all sides, the feeling of mutual frenzy and community that builds from being all sandwiched together too close for comfort for so long. He loves his job, wouldn’t give it up for the world, but sometimes he misses the experience of being a face in the crowd. The world feels like it’s proceeding in fast-forward and before he knows it, the show is over and kids are trickling out in twos and threes. Liz helps him take merch down - she and the boys had loaded out their stuff while he had been manning the merch table - and after everything is put away in the vans the bands linger in the parking lot.

Zayn lights up a joint and offers it around, which is how Michael meets him officially for the first time. “No thanks, man,” he says, feeling Liz’s warning expression burning into the back of his neck. “Your set was brilliant though,” he adds, and Zayn pulls him into a solemn yet appreciative hug. When they pull apart he’s uncomfortably damp. Zayn says they’ll talk later and wanders away, looking for kindred spirits. Michael leans against the side of the van and watches everyone else socialize, which is something he does a lot. Luke and Josh are bantering about something, sitting side by side on the tailgate of the trailer. No one knows where Calum is - meaning he’s probably snuck off to get high with Zayn - and Liz is hovering around the way only a mother can do.

Normally Luke would be the one to pull him into the swing of things right away, or if he doesn’t notice then Calum eventually will drift over to where he’s sitting and bring him into a conversation. Neither of his bandmates understand what it’s like to be an introvert. It’s not that he doesn’t want to be around people - he does, he absolutely does - it’s that he wants to be around people but finds himself quickly worn out where most people seem to become more energized. Everyone around seems to understand this and leaves him alone, for the moment.

The only person he doesn’t see for a while is Louis, who he feels somewhat connected to - being the only person he officially knows and all - and Michael is about to crawl into the van to try and sleep when Louis appears out of nowhere. “Hey, mate,” he says, even brighter than he was before the show. He’s got a takeaway bag and offers it eagerly to Michael.

“What are you,” Michael says, “Some kind of fuckin’, like, Maccas fairy or something?” before he reaches into the bag and steals a handful of fries. If gold had a taste, he thinks, this would definitely be it. And it’s probably just from the lack of sleep and amount of travel he’s done in the last twenty-four hours that he’s thinking it, but he thinks Louis Tomlinson might be worth his weight in gold too.

Louis scowls at him and goes, “Well, you’ve got the fairy part right, at least.”

Automatically, Michael goes, “Takes one to know one,” and Louis bursts out laughing. “Wow, I just burned myself. Awesome. But yeah,” he shrugs, and that’s that conversation done and dusted. Louis offers him the rest of his chicken nuggets, which Michael gladly takes. They spend the rest of the time in the parking lot leaning against the van together; eventually someone produces a six-pack from somewhere and they pass a beer between them. It’s the first time Michael has hung out with a guy - like, a gay guy, a guy he could be into without it feeling awkward - in a long time. They both smell like ass; Michael hasn’t showered since they left Calum’s house yesterday morning and Louis smells about the same level of tour grime already. When Liz calls for them to get in the van Michael sighs and covers his face with one hand. “Tour mum,” he sighs.

“Good hangin’ with ya, Mikey Big Red Dog,” Louis says. Michael could just about punch him. And does, though Louis is quick to catch his fist before it collides with anything.

“Fuck you,” he whines, “You’re not supposed to use Myspace names in real life. Tommo,” he adds, for good measure. He tries a second time to punch Louis - he’s not mad, or anything, it just seems like a more appropriate outlet to vent his frustration than anything - and Louis catches his hand again, twists their arms around so they’re holding hands, kind of.

Liz calls for him a second time and Louis just smirks up at him. That he can look like that while being about as tall as a garden gnome is… infuriating. “You’d better go before you get sent to bed without any supper,” Louis teases. Before Michael can retaliate any further Louis bounces up on his toes and presses their lips together, just for a second, before bounding off toward his own van, calling over his shoulder, “See you in the morning!”

It’s not a magical moment of clarity, or anything even close to that. It’s the feeling that Michael can kiss people who aren’t Ashton without feeling like he can’t breathe under the weight of the wrongness of it. He doesn’t know if there’s any real spark to it, or anything, but it’s close to the start of something he can hang onto without feeling empty inside the whole time. Louis is a good-looking dude; Michael might be fucked up in the heart but he can at least acknowledge that fact. He climbs into the backseat of the van and huddles up beside Calum, who smells distinctly of weed and a thin layer of Axe. Liz, he’s assuming, is pretending not to notice it - or maybe she’s just that tired herself. She certainly doesn’t say anything about the him and Louis situation, which is less of a situation and more of a ‘What the fuck?’ By the time he’s found a comfortable way to sit on the seat with his head on Calum’s shoulder, they’ve got the town limits in their rearview mirrors and he is half-asleep huddled under a sleeping bag that Liz had produced from one of their multitude of suitcases. He’s a little amazed that she’d managed to Tetris everything into the van without needing to rent a trailer. All in all, it’s not a bad start to their first proper tour away from home.

Michael meets Luke in front of the mall after getting dropped off by his mother. “Are you sure you won’t need more than that?” she asks before he gets out of the car, hand already in her pocketbook before he can refuse the crisp bill she presses into his hand. He’s tried telling her that going to the mall is not about the money, is not about buying things, it’s just about hanging out somewhere there aren’t always parents or siblings lurking about.

“Mum,” he sighs, “It’s fine. Really.” Before she can argue her point further, he unclicks his seatbelt and gets out of the car. He thinks he should have asked David or Joy to drop him off; instead he had gone home to get changed, spent far too long in front of the mirror, and his hair’s doing this stupid thing he doesn’t like now. They would have asked too many questions, he had thought, and so he had gone home and demanded a ride from his own mother for once in his life. Luke is sitting on the edge of one of the planters smirking at him like there’s something funny. “Hey,” he says, “Sorry about my mum. She’s… You know what, never mind.” He flicks his fringe out of his face self-consciously.

“It’s cool,” Luke tells him. “I’m just glad you came instead of, like, blowing me off or whatever.”

Michael frowns at that. Luke might be kind of lame but he’s not the kind of guy you blow off when he offers to hang out. “Nah, my best friend has footie practice and I’d rather lose a limb than sit through that again, if I’m honest.” They’re just walking through the mall corridor, not really looking in any of the shop windows or anything. Luke asks him about Calum’s footie practice and, out of habit, he sighs and goes, “Yeah, he’s on the school team and he’s being scouted for the national team or whatever, I don’t really know. I don’t really do the whole ‘sports’ thing, myself. They’re going to Brazil next month for some camp thing, too.”

“I’ve never even been out of the country, myself,” Luke admits to him. “Or been on a school team. I went to public school last year, but this year I’m doing home school. Public was… not a great time, really,” and he shrugs it off but Michael can tell there’s something deeper to it. Probably bullying, he decides, which is shitty since Luke seems like he’s a pretty cool guy. Michael ends up talking about the time he went to New Zealand with Calum’s family and met Calum’s grandparents. It’s surprisingly easy to talk to Luke. They go to the food court and share an order of chili cheese fries, talk about bands they’ve both listened to. After they’ve eaten, they go stand outside so Luke can smoke a cigarette. While he shifts position trying to catch a light, Luke swears at his crappy Bic lighter and tells Michael, “Don’t ever start smoking, it’s an awful habit,” and eventually Michael shifts his body to act as a shield from the wind for him.

“Don’t you ever get tired of it when it rains or whatever?” Michael asks, looking at the ground where it’s tacky with spit and discarded gum has been smashed into the pavement. A fat bumblebee hovers lazily over the trash bin beside the door, almost as large as his thumb. He fiddles with his wallet chain while he waits for Luke to finish, gnawing at the inside of his cheek while he watches people going in and out of the mall.

Luke shrugs. “My brothers smoke so at home we just kind of all go,” he says. “It’s not really a big deal in my family. Like, mum wishes we would all quit, of course, but I think she understands that it’s like a bonding thing or whatever.” He looks decidedly uncomfortable about the conversation so Michael lets it drop. “C’mon,” Luke says a moment later. “Let’s go to JB Hi-Fi and look at CDs and stuff.” And it feels completely normal to fall into step with him as they walk through the crowded mall together, occasionally bumping elbows and glancing over at one another awkwardly but making no effort to determine what happens next. Holding hands feels like too much of a commitment. It’s been a long time since he’s meshed with someone this naturally, so Michael kind of revels in it as they look at the limited selection of CDs the store has in the ‘Punk’ section.

He picks up a copy of ‘Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge’ and turns it over in his hands to look at the track listing. “Hey, what do you think of MCR?” he asks. He’s only seen the one video from them on Fuse, but he had liked it a lot. He hadn’t been able to find any of their songs on Limewire, though, so it might be worth buying the album so he can burn it for Mali and Calum. Luke echoes his feelings, saying that he liked them, and Michael holds onto it as they continue browsing. It wouldn’t be the first time he had bought music to impress someone. It probably won’t be the last, either. They go to the music shop on the other side of the mall and he buys himself some new guitar strings, Calum some new picks.

“Hang on,” Luke says as they’re heading for the register to ring up his things. “I wanna grab some new sticks, just,” and he drags Michael over to the row of boxes and boxes of drumsticks and picks some out, casually.

“Wait,” Michael stammers awkwardly, “You play?”

“Yeah,” Luke shrugs, like it’s no big deal. Michael is ten seconds from asking him to be in the band - without consulting Calum, without having a proper practice or conversation about it or anything - when the worst possible thing happens. Across the corridor he spots a familiar figure headed in their direction and he can’t form words, just an alarmed squawk, and he grabs onto Luke before they can exit the store. “Uh, are you alright?” Luke asks him, taking in his probably noticeably paler cheeks and the thin sheen of nervous sweat he can feel forming across his upper lip. Michael clutches his upper arm, trying to decide if it’s less conspicuous if they hide behind a magazine rack or if he drops dead on the spot.

Because this cannot be happening right now. He cannot be in the same place as Ashton at the same time, not like this, not on what looks and feels suspiciously like a date, not with another guy. Not with Ashton looking the way he looks with his stupid jeans rolled up at the ankle and no socks on, not smiling at his sister as she begs him to take her to Claire’s - something Michael would have done without argument, because he loves the stupid fuckin’ jelly bracelets and spiked wristbands and knock-off Avril Lavigne ties - and definitely not at a time when he’s feeling so vulnerable. “My ex,” Michael says weakly. “He’s here.”

He doesn’t know how to appropriately communicate the horribleness of this situation to Luke, who raises an eyebrow at him and is probably thinking, ‘Wow, this dude is weird.’ Instead he says, “Wow, that sucks,” and in a maybe-act of commiseration with the situation he slips his arm around Michael’s waist, like they’re totally on a date and this is a totally normal happening in their lives. He stands on his tip-toes to try and see over Michael’s shoulder. Michael grimaces internally and pretends to be, like, very interested in back-issues of Spin magazine. “Shit,” Luke hisses. “He’s coming this way.”

“Do you think we can leave without him seeing?” Michael asks.

“Definitely not,” Luke says out the side of his mouth, which makes it obvious that he’s trying to be secretive. “I’m pretty sure he’s spotted us. Just act natural, it’ll be fine,” he says, brimming with false optimism. Somehow Michael suspects that Ashton will see through this ruse; he’s pretty sure Ashton is smart enough to realize that Michael isn’t actually dating Luke, that he wouldn’t… The thought makes him feel like crying and his throat feels like it’s getting tight, like maybe he will, but he doesn’t want to do that in front of Ashton. His only choice in this situation is to act like he doesn’t care at all. He is happy, he tells himself. He has moved on with his life. He is happy with his new boyfriend, who is not in fact his boyfriend, who he wants to be in his crappy pop-punk band. These are the things he tells himself as he clings to Luke for dear life on approach; he wonders how obviously this plan is falling apart, how clear it looks that he does not want to be here anymore.

He pretends not to have noticed Ashton as they exit the music store, holding Luke’s bag as well as his own for good measure. He tries to project an air of outward good boyfriend-liness, in case it makes Ashton realize what he’s missing, or something. Because Michael thinks he would be a really good boyfriend if anyone ever gave him the chance to be. He keeps his eyes on the ground in front of him right up until Ashton stops and says, “Michael! Hey,” and then he freezes in place.

“Hey,” he says back, voice faltering. Luke squeezes his hand, now slick with sweat. “How are… things?”

Ashton shrugs good-naturedly - and that’s the problem, is that even now he is so nice all the time it’s hard to be mad at him - and goes, “Ahhh, you know, Lauren’s at Claire’s, figured I would come say hi, see how you’re doing… So, yeah.” His smile is so brilliant it’s almost blinding, and it hurts to know that he’s fine - actually, genuinely fine - when Michael feels cut-up and raw inside still.

Before he can think of anything to say Luke has stuck his free hand out and said, “Hi, I’m Luke.” Ashton shakes his hand awkwardly, shooting Michael a confused look, and Luke continues with, “Mikey’s new boyfriend,” and they quickly break eye contact, as if they’ve both been electrocuted. Almost as though the awkwardness rolls off him, Luke begins to guide Michael in the opposite direction, adding in a gentle, “We’d better hurry if we don’t want to be late for the show, babe,” and he keeps their hands intertwined until long after they’re out of sight.

They duck out the doors just before the box office for the crappy movie theater in the mall - the other one, the one Michael and Ashton had gone to on their one and only kind-of date, is on the other side of the city in its own complex - and Luke fishes his cigarettes out of his pocket and offers one to Michael before lighting his own. “Can I honestly just die now,” Michael complains, reaching for Luke’s cigarette instead of taking his own. It seems like a waste to take a whole one when he knows he won’t finish it.

“Oh, come on, it wasn’t that awkward,” Luke says, flicking the ash off in a practiced motion. On this side of the mall there are less people; the parking lot isn’t in a great place, and since the movie theater sees less foot traffic during the day they’re alone outside the double-paned glass doors. “At least now he won’t think you’re sitting at home listening to, like, Bright Eyes and crying, or something.” Michael presses his lips together and pretends that he hadn’t spent a week doing exactly that after the break-up, only it hadn’t been Bright Eyes. It had been Dashboard Confessional, and he had laid on his bed in the dark crying until he couldn’t anymore, until his chest hurt, and what he’s feeling right now is a cheap imitation of that. It feels like life just sucker-punched him in the chest. He sighs, slumps against the wall. Maybe he should have gone to Calum’s footie practice after all…

He takes the cigarette again, takes a shallow drag and holds the smoke in his mouth before coughing it out. Luke laughs at him. “Fuck off, I’m not a professional like you,” he goes, reaching out to swat at Luke’s arms sourly.

Luke simply rolls his eyes. “Amateur,” he jokes, clearly trying to lighten the mood.

“You know what, my mum thinks I’m cool,” Michael shoots back.

“Yeah, that’s what she said last night,” Luke goes, and it’s a lame joke. It’s such a fucking lame joke that Michael laughs anyway. He’s so busy laughing that he doesn’t notice at first when Luke goes in for the kiss, and when it happens he doesn’t exactly mind it. They stumble backwards, trying to coordinate their movements so that their noses stop bumping, teeth clicking together uncomfortably as they kiss. Michael can’t stop laughing the whole time. It’s just - it’s such a stupid situation to go from being anxious about seeing Ashton to suddenly kissing Luke. He’s never met anyone so easy to be around and it feels like he’s taking it for granted. Like, he’s not Calum or anything - and it goes without saying that he would never kiss Calum like this, for instance - but there’s a certain type of relief that comes from kissing someone else and being able to enjoy it. The first time, it had been something to fill the sucking emptiness inside his chest. This feels a little more like something akin to enjoying himself, though it’s awkward and mismatched due to their heights.

Still, it’s fun. The idea that they could get caught gets into his head, though, and he breaks the kiss to say, “We should probably find somewhere better to do this.” Luke’s cheeks are flushed; he shifts his feet, adorably pigeon-toed, and follows Michael inside sheepishly.

“We could really go see a movie or something,” Luke thinks aloud, looking at the backlit marquee with the show times displayed on it. The selection at this theater is crap, though, all films that are closer to being released on VHS and DVD than being new releases. “Or there’s some bands playing a show downtown, if you want? I’ll pay your cover,” he offers. “My mum can drive us.”

Michael thinks about it a moment before deciding. “Yeah, sounds wicked,” he says. “D’you think I should call Calum and see if him and Mali want to go? She’ll buy us drinks if you want,” and he’s pleased with himself for coming up with the plan. If Mali drives then no parents need to be involved, keeping the embarrassment to a minimum. Michael has suffered more than his share of humiliation for the day, thanks, no need to have either of his mums add to the pot so late in the day. Secretly he’s also hoping to damage control the situation a bit - keep Calum and Mali both away from Myspace in case word gets around that he’s calling Luke his boyfriend, fake as it may be, before he has a chance to explain what had happened to them. He knows they’ll understand, he just wants them to hear it from him first.

Not that Ashton’s the type to go spreading his business all over Myspace, or anything, but there’s the distinct possibility that the freshman scene queens hovering outside the entrance to Claire’s had overheard and he’d hate for that to be the way Calum and Luke were introduced to each other. They find a bank of payphones by the stairs to the upper level - which is mainly comprised of offices and things, Michael’s dentist is up there - and Luke calls his mum while Michael calls Calum’s house, twisting the cord around his finger the way he does at home.

Mali picks up on the third ring. “Hey, it’s me,” Michael says. “I’m at the mall with a friend and there’s a show tonight. Do you and Calum want to go?”

Her initial response is, “Wait, you have friends besides Calum? That’s new,” and then, “Yeah, we’ll come. Meet us out front in half an hour,” and then the operator voice is asking for fifty pence more, so Michael lets the line go dead.

Luke’s still on the phone with his mum and turns to Michael. “My mum wants to know if I can stay at yours after the show or if she should pick me up,” he says. Figuring it won’t be a big deal - if Calum’s mum says no they can always go back to Michael’s house - Michael says it shouldn’t be a problem. “See? It’s fine with his mum, it’s fine - honestly, mum! You’re being hysterical, calm down, no one will be doing drugs and sex is definitely off the table,” Luke goes, trying and failing to hide the fact that his cheeks have become bright red at that last statement. He does the thing with his feet again, which Michael finds oddly charming, and they walk through the mall one last time before finally stopping to sit on one of the planters out in front of the wall while they wait for Calum and Mali to show up.

In typical teenage fashion, they get bored of waiting quickly. “You wanna make out some more?” Michael asks. Luke responds by clutching at the collar of his shirt and kissing him clumsily, not seeming to care who sees them. He doesn’t mind it when Luke’s thigh slips between his; he doesn’t think they’ll go any farther than just making out occasionally but his feelings could change in the future. It’s a pleasant distraction, nothing more. They get snapped out of it this time by a car horn honking. The car in question is of course Mali’s, which leads Michael down a deep and unabiding shame spiral at being caught making out with his new kind-of friend in the mall parking lot where they are assumedly supposed to have been waiting with eager anticipation for Calum and Mali’s arrival. He gets caught up in thinking about that, about what kind of fucked-up friendship politics that is, when the horn goes again.

“Oh my god, just get in the car,” Calum says, and then rolls up the car window slowly. He looks annoyed.

Obediently, Michael gets into the car, followed by Luke who is apparently oblivious to humiliation. “Hi,” he says brightly. “I’m Luke. New friend slash fake boyfriend of your best friend.” He extends his hand as if to shake Calum’s hand, holding it in midair expectantly for a moment before it becomes obvious that Calum is not going to reciprocate the gesture. Not how Michael would have introduced them, but then getting caught with his metaphorical pants down wasn’t how he had planned it, either. He’s a great decision-maker.

“We leave you alone for one afternoon,” Calum mutters darkly.

“I got the new MCR album,” Michael says, watching as Calum rips the cellophane wrapper off and puts the CD into the disc drive forcefully after he hands the case over. He has no delusions of forcing Luke and Calum to become friends; he knows when to let people bury the hatchet and when to try harder. This one is a case of the former. Like, he himself may be rigid as hell about certain people but Calum, once he’s decided not to like someone, is even worse. They sit and listen to it in the mall parking lot and Michael considers making out with Luke some more to kill the awkwardness. Only that wouldn’t solve the problem; it would make it worse and he knows that as soon as they’re alone Calum will have some speech for him about how kissing people because he’s bored isn’t emotionally healthy and that he’s here if Michael needs to talk. It’s all so predictable that Michael kind of wants to go home and play his guitar, write some songs, make something different since reality is ruining his life.

He forgets about his original intention of asking Luke to be in the band. He forgets to bring it up at all because first there’s ‘Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge’ and then they’re at the show, moshing and pogo-ing until their legs give out and then Mali drops Michael and Luke off at Michael’s house afterward. Predictably, Calum had had a fit about Luke staying the night. The bands that night weren’t particularly good - Michael thinks that his band could have been better, if they were booking shows anymore or had any motivation to move forward with it - but by the end of the night he’s too exhausted to think of anything more than collapsing onto his bed with Luke following suit after him and falling into a dreamless sleep.

In the morning he doesn’t know what to do so he pours them both a bowl of Coco Puffs and brings them downstairs with the gallon jug of milk, setting them on his desk so the milk doesn’t slop over the sides of the bowls when he pours it. “Sorry about Calum last night,” he says sheepishly, once they’re both awake. “He can be kind of a dick sometimes. He’s protective, I guess,” and before he can say any more he shoves a spoonful of cereal into his mouth.

“I kind of got that vibe, yeah,” Luke says. He’s wearing one of Michael’s t-shirts, borrowed to sleep in. His legs are pale and skinny on the sheets; he looks so much younger than sixteen. “It’s not a big deal,” he adds. “Most people don’t like me, I’m kind of used to it.” He drags the spoon against the backs of his teeth on its way back to the bowl and while it’s an annoying habit, it’s nothing worth hating someone over. Michael can’t imagine the kind of person who could hate Luke. It puts him in an awkward spot because he knows - without even having a conversation about it - that Calum will ask him to choose between them, and Michael is the kind of person who secretly roots for the underdog. Calum would be the most popular guy in their class if it weren’t for him. He’s often thought that Calum would be better off without him, that Calum’s social life would improve dramatically if he weren’t around constantly.

Michael says, “I’ll talk to him about it,” and he sincerely means it. They get on the computer after that and look up bands on Myspace, play a bit of Sims until Luke’s mum comes to pick him up in the afternoon. It’s the longest Michael has gone without speaking to Calum since they became friends eight years ago. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do about it, because he doesn’t have a lot of friends and he can’t have them fighting with each other constantly. Luke might be willing to let a lot of things roll off his shoulders, but Calum is the type of guy who picks fights over everything. Not all the time - not even at first - but he’s always collecting things, holding onto them as collateral for the best possible moment after years of being the younger child.

He sits at his computer for a long time after Luke has gone, staring at the new post page on Livejournal. He hasn’t updated his LJ in what feels like forever. There’s nothing to say. It feels like the words he used to put there have all been sucked out of him, leaving him an empty shell sitting on an office chair in a darkened basement. It feels like the precipice of something, but that thought makes him feel like an asshole and so he doesn’t pursue it any further.

Michael first meets Harry when there’s a break between tours and he spends the time in L.A. with Louis. They’re not officially an item; they’re more friends who make out occasionally and make the dirtiest jokes imaginable together. No Direction are in the studio recording their sophomore album, so most days Michael wakes up late in the afternoon alone in their hotel room amid the empty pizza boxes and crumpled beer cans from the night before. He supposes it’s good that Louis is not actually his boyfriend because they’re terrible together; he hasn’t showered in too many days to count and he cuddled with Louis and Zayn last night while they talked about aliens for a solid hour after smoking a bowl. And that’s the other reason he’s glad they’re not dating - he’s getting tired of tripping over Louis’ bong and spilling dirty bong water all over the carpets.

“That’s what housekeeping is for,” Louis told him the first time it had happened. Michael had made a face and cleaned it up himself the best he could, soaking it up with layer after layer of two-ply toilet paper and sprinkling baking soda on the stain that he’d had to go out at four in the morning to buy. It’s a strange life. He feels like he got some cosmic brownie points for that one, even if it was a waste of toilet paper in the end.

So he wakes up alone in the afternoon and stumbles his way into the bathroom to splash some water on his face. He needs to get out of this hole he’s been occupying recently in his head where everything is nothing and too much at the same time. He stands there for longer than he’d like to admit staring mirror-Michael down before committing to the acts of showering and shaving. If he lets himself go for too long he reverts back to his natural basement goblin form. The shower in the hotel room screams if he runs the hot water for too long. With a sigh he stands under it for as long as he can tolerate the screaming for and washes his hair, scraping his ragged nails over his scalp and scrubbing hard to get rid of the grease build-up. That’s a real thing he has to deal with. On tour, it’s kind of acceptable to have a level of grime but he’s pretty sure that when he’s not on tour, it just makes him a gross person. He rinses his hair until the water runs clear; a couple of nights before he and Louis had decided to dye his hair blue but the dye underneath hadn’t quite faded yet and they were too lazy to bleach it again so soon, so it’s this weird muted purple color. By the time he’s finished with that the water has run cold and the pipes have stopped screaming. The shaving can wait, he decides, since it’s unlikely that he will meet anyone of consequence today and the novelty of being able to grow more than three facial hairs has not worn off yet.

Since he has been in L.A. he hasn’t really done anything, is the thing. He digs through his duffel bag for clean clothes and chooses the least bad-smelling shirt he can find. Then he digs through Louis’ stuff and steals a pair of jeans, because fuck you and also he is a failure at packing. “Louis probably won’t miss these,” he groans as he hops and lunges to fit into the jeans. “I mean, they look better on me,” he reasons with himself, flopping onto the bed ass-first and sucking in his stomach so he can button them. Wriggles his hips until the zipper goes all the way up and then stands up triumphantly, feeling like an overstuffed sausage in the too-small jeans. He looks at his reflection in the full-length mirror and goes, “I have no idea how Louis does this every day, but I look damn good.”

He’s feeling pretty good about himself as he pulls on his jean jacket and heads down to the hotel lobby to flag down a cab. He has nothing else to do today, so Michael has decided to go to the label offices and see if there’s anything he can help with. The cabbie doesn’t recognize him even though ‘Don’t Stop’ is playing on the Top 40 station. When they roll up to the Sony building Michael thumbs through the bills in his wallet, chooses the largest denomination and hands it to the driver.

“Keep the change,” he says.

The driver makes for his own wallet to get the correct change. “You sure, man?” And Michael knows the cabbie’s trying to be nice, that he probably thinks Michael could use the money more than he could, but Michael waves the bills away. He can’t tell American currency apart for the life of him, and right now he has more money than he knows what to do with.

“Yeah, it’s good,” he tells the man before turning away and trying to wedge his shiny new cell phone out of his jeans pocket. He’s still not familiar with it; it’s one of those Sony Ericsson deals that’s supposed to play music, but he still prefers his iPod so he doesn’t have to carry different headphones and a stupid little adapter thing that he’ll just end up losing. He punches the buttons on it to dial the front desk and when the girl who works there picks up, he goes, “Hey, it’s Mikey from 5SOS, can you let me in? I can’t remember the punch code for the door.” The girl sighs good-naturedly and buzzes him in. He can never remember her name - it’s, like, Melanie or Michelle or some name like that - but he smiles at her gratefully as he passes by.

The first floor is nondescript conference rooms; there’s a staircase and an elevator in the hallway behind the reception area. Michael presses the call button for the elevator and waits for it shifting from one foot to the other impatiently, wondering if Simon is even in today for him to bother. If he’s not, then the next stop on his journey will most likely be Feldy’s studio if he hasn’t got a client in. Feldy’s usually recording or writing with someone, though, and even if he does have a client in Michael wouldn’t be opposed to assisting with some song-writing. The thing is, he’s going bored out of his mind without anything to do all day. He had thought that when he agreed to spend the holidays in L.A. with Louis and the boys, there would be a lot more going on than there actually is. It feels like giving up to go home now, especially since he knows Luke won’t be in the mood to hang out and Calum is spending the time off in New Zealand with his family.

There’s no good reason for him to be spending an afternoon at the label office, especially on a Friday when most people have already gone home and he knows Simon’s probably left for London already. He pokes his head into Simon’s office, pausing to admire the shiny new nameplate outside the door with SIMON COWELL in all caps, but the lights are off in the waiting area and the office door proper is locked. Disheartened, he walks back down the hallway to the elevators wondering if anyone is in today besides the poor girl working the front desk. Instead of going back down to the ground floor right away he jabs the button for the second floor, where the employee lounge and - more importantly - the coffee machines are located. It’s five p.m. but he feels like he needs a nine a.m. interview amount of coffee to function. On the way down in the elevator, he checks his text messages, hoping to hear something from Louis or Zayn about evening plans, but there’s nothing in his inbox and he hasn’t got the patience or desire to socialize enough to plan an outing on his own.

He supposes he could call Ashley and see if she knows anything to do, but he’s pretty sure she’s back in New Jersey with her family anyway. The elevator dings when it arrives on the second floor and Michael quickly makes his way to the employee lounge and starts a fresh pot of coffee. Technically he’s pretty sure he’s not supposed to be using the employee facilities but it’s better than going to Starbucks and getting mobbed by teenage girls when he just wants a damn coffee. While the coffee machine burbles away he snoops in the drawers and organizes the packs of artificial sweetener on the counter by color and size. Once the coffee is brewed he takes a travel mug from one of the cupboards and pours the liquid into it, followed by six packets of sugar and the end of the carton of half-and-half in the small refrigerator. He might be kind of a dick for taking someone else’s mug and finishing all the half-and-half.

To make up for it he puts a tenner under the coffee maker with the edge sticking out and writes on a napkin that he finds in one of the drawers to say, ‘Sorry I took your mug and all the creamer’ and figures that will more than make up for it in the end. As he’s leaving the employee lounge he’s still trying to fit the lid onto his stolen travel mug. He’s not paying attention to where he’s going - considering that no one is in, as far as he can tell, it shouldn’t be a big deal - and of course that is when he bumps into someone as he’s walking full speed, causing coffee to slop out of the travel mug and all over both of them.

“Shit,” he says. “I am so sorry.” He repeats it about ten times in under a minute, still holding the stolen mug and staring dumbfoundedly at the kid he spilled coffee on, trying to place him.

The kid just goes, “It’s okay, I’ve got it,” and flashes him a blindingly white smile. He’s definite boy band material - maybe that’s where Michael recognizes him from? - but he carries himself with such politeness and charisma that he can’t possibly be from one of the pop star farms that the labels pull together their groups from. The kid’s white t-shirt is ruined though, stained with coffee in a way that renders the fabric completely see-through. He doesn’t seem bothered by it.

“I am so sorry,” Michael repeats.

“It happens,” the kid tells him confidently. He extends his hand and they shake, then he introduces himself. “Harry Styles,” he says, pausing to give Michael a moment to register some sort of recognition. When it doesn’t click, he sucks his bottom lip in and goes, “X Factor? I won the latest - you know what, never mind, it doesn’t matter. Let me buy you a new coffee,” and then he’s swept Michael effortlessly into the elevator while Michael has been goggling at him. Harry Styles has curly brown hair and the kind of face that Michael knows is going to be absolutely obscene once puberty is finished with him; right now he’s got that fresh-faced early Justin Timberlake look to him, but he’s gangly in all the places that say he’s going to sprout up in height a few months from now and become some kind of teenaged sex symbol.

Not that, you know, he’s checking out a potentially underage pop star. That would be inappropriate. “I don’t really follow television shows,” Michael admits. “I’m on tour most of the year with my band.” He feels like he should have a demo or something to be handing out. Instead he stands there and wrings his hands, awkwardly hoping that Harry Styles has heard of his band before.

He’s about to blurt out the name of his band when Harry goes, “Yeah, you guys are brilliant, I snuck into one of your London shows when we were on a break from filming X Factor!” Michael grins at the idea of this curly-headed wonder child sneaking into a punk show. The producers probably didn’t like that very much, he thinks. “So do you drink Starbucks or are you a Dunkin’ man?” Harry Styles asks, seeming not to notice his coffee-soaked shirt.

Michael shrugs. “Either one,” he replies. “I don’t really have a preference, I don’t drink a lot of coffee.” He feels bad about spilling coffee on Harry, though, and he slips out of his jacket. “Put this on until we can get you a new shirt or something, at least,” he offers. It’s not cold enough for him to need an extra layer, anyway.

“If it makes you feel better, I will,” Harry says. It looks out of place, him wearing Michael’s jacket. They’ll just have to hope that no one notices them sneaking around the corner to the coffee shop. Michael is pretty sure that if this kid is an X Factor winner, the gossip mags are going to have something to say about him sneaking around with some punk’s jacket on with a bunch of band patches stuck on like a shitty patchwork quilt. “Hey,” he asks as they walk, arm in arm like they’re old friends, “Do you know the band Rise Against?”

“Wait,” Michael goes, stopping dead in his tracks from the shock. “You know Rise Against? They’re only, like, one of my favorite bands.”

Harry looks down at the patches on Michael’s jacket and runs his fingers over them wonderingly. “You like Good Charlotte, yeah?” he asks as they step into a mostly-deserted Dunkin’ Donuts. The only people inside are the employees, who mostly look bored of being at work. When Michael nods, Harry says, “Brilliant!” and taps his chin thoughtfully. They spend the time waiting for their coffees exchanging band names excitedly. It reminds Michael of being at home before the band took off, throwing band names back and forth with guys twice his age at shows as they tried to prove he was a ‘poser’ for wearing a Ramones t-shirt or whatever. He hopes he isn’t making Harry feel that way; he’s just excited that he’s found someone to hang out with who has similar interests to his own. Because he likes hanging out with Louis and Zayn and Josh, but sometimes it’s isolating as hell to be the only sober person in the room and trying to carry on a conversation.

They sit at a rickety table in the dimmest corner of the shop. Michael has to admire Harry for how natural it all comes to him - picking the most secluded location to sit, giving a fake name without hesitation to the barista, sitting with his back to the window to avoid recognition. “So tell me,” Michael asks once he’s drained half the coffee from his cup, “What is a future pop star from London doing in Los Angeles this close to the holidays?”

“No rest for the wicked, or something,” Harry shrugs. “They’ve got me staying at this posh flat in West Hollywood under the guise of ‘songwriting’ but we all know how that road goes,” he says with a fluttering, vague hand gesture. And Michael knows that he should consider himself lucky that he gets to write his own songs - he can’t imagine singing someone else’s lyrics - but something about Harry tells him that it has less to do with his abilities as a songwriter and more to do with his inability to keep himself in the closet. If there even is a closet; assuming someone else’s sexuality is a pretty presumptuous thing to do but Harry is sending out some pretty obviously no-hetero vibes.

Michael presses his lips together firmly and decides not to say anything about it. Harry will tell him when he’s good and ready, he thinks, if there is anything to tell. “My band is on a break until Warped Tour,” he says, changing the direction of the conversation in what he hopes is a casual manner. “My bandmate just had surgery so we’ve taken some time off for him to recover and then we’re hitting the studio to record the new album in the fall.” Parroting the lie to Harry feels more natural than it had in interviews directly after Luke’s surgery, but he’s anxious that someone will call him on it nonetheless.

All Harry says is, “That’s too bad. I hope he feels better soon,” and squeezes Michael’s forearm sympathetically. He doesn’t press forward with any more questions. Instead he takes a sip of his frappé and asks, “Will you be in the city for the holidays, then?”

“I’m spending New Year’s with my parents,” Michael says. He feels a twinge of regret at Harry’s disappointed expression.

Harry purses his lips and says, “I’m performing on Dick Clark’s show. I think I might shit myself onstage.” He laughs nervously and spreads his hands flat on the table, palms down. “I mean, my mum and sister and everyone is going to be there but I think that’s just making me more nervous, you know? Like, what if I forget the words in front of everyone or something?” He shudders and then takes another sip of his frappé calmly.

Michael considers the objective horror of forgetting a song lyric on national television for a moment and then tells him, “Don’t fuck up, then.” Harry rolls his eyes at this comment and before the conversation can go any further, his cell phone starts ringing. He extracts the tiny red and silver unit from his jeans and flips it open, looking comically tiny as he holds it to his ear. While he talks on the phone Michael thinks about going to Times Square for New Year’s, but that seems a bit of a stupid idea considering he and Harry have just met. He doesn’t mind sitting and waiting while Harry listens to whoever is on the other end of the phone, nodding and occasionally giving one-word replies or noises of affirmation.

“This was fun,” Harry says after he’s ended the phone call. “I’m at the Viper Room most nights, if you’re free.” They walk back to the Sony building together and then Harry disappears into a town car with dark-tinted windows. Michael has the feeling that he’s just gotten his first glimpse at what true celebrity is; Harry just exudes this air of strange and other-ness that brings him to suspect that this kid’s career is going to explode someday. He grabs the first cab he can find and goes back to the hotel. He uses Louis’ credit card to get internet on the television and uses the dinky little keyboard to navigate the Web, looking up Harry’s time on the X Factor. The pictures from the promotional material all have him hair-sprayed and baby pink-lipsticked to the high heavens. Later, Michael and Louis will have an argument over the credit card thing. Right now, Michael is marveling at the difference between X Factor-Harry and regular person-Harry. It seems like something worth noting.

He’s still lying on the bed feeling lonesome when Louis stumbles back into the hotel room later on in the evening. “Hey,” Louis says, voice rough and croaky from a full day of tracking vocals. He flops onto the bed beside Michael without taking his shoes off first and sighs heavily. “What did you get up to today? Anything?”

Michael looks up from his Gameboy Advance. “Went to the label office for a bit,” he says. “Met a cool guy there, might go out for drinks with him in a bit. Have you ever been to the Viper Room?” he asks, jabbing the B button on his Advance viciously. He’s trying to keep his Togepi from evolving because the thing it evolves into is stupid-looking and useless in a battle but he doesn’t have the Everstone yet. And of course the logistics of having a Togepi in his party are a nightmare, but he’s loved the stupid thing ever since it first appeared in the Pokémon anime, so he’s determined to keep it and level it as far as he possibly can without sacrificing wins.

Louis blinks at him blearily. “Did you just say that you got invited to the Viper Room?” He pushes his head into Michael’s lap. It’s not a sexual thing - they don’t do that kind of thing together; the most they’ve done is one time jerking off in the same room when they were too drunk (Michael) and too stoned (Louis) to be concerned about privacy or propriety of any sort. He clears his throat bitchily and prods Michael in the stomach when he doesn’t reply. “Hey. Asshole. Tear yourself away from your Pokémon for long enough to tell me how you got invited to the Viper Room before I did.”

“Have you ever heard of Harry Styles?” Michael asks. He doesn’t look up from his game. Briefly he wonders if Harry plays Pokémon, if they should trade Pokémon the next time they see each other, but he realizes that that might be uncool now and he doesn’t want people to think he’s lame.

“Have I heard of Harry bloody Styles,” Louis grumbles. “Fizz and Lottie only hijacked my bloody cell phone to call in their votes for the kid for six bloody weeks, and here you are suddenly telling me that you’re besties with him and he invited you to the bloody Viper Room with him? Is there some kind of conspiracy that I’m unaware of that says that Harry bloody Styles has to ruin my fucking life every step of the way?”

With a deep sigh Michael saves his game and shuts his Advance off. “Look, I just wanted to know if you would come with me or not but if you don’t want to hang out somewhere that Pete Wentz also hangs out, that’s your choice.” He waits a moment before sliding off the end of the bed. The thing with Louis is that he has to feel like everything he does is his own idea, even if Michael suggests something an hour beforehand and he comes back like it’s a brand new idea that he’s never heard before. It’s annoying as hell, but over the last few months Michael has learned to deal with it. Rather than fight with Louis over one of his ill-gotten biases he pads into the bathroom to clean himself up enough to go out. He’s a goddamn adult, he can go out and get drunk and rub elbows with celebrities on his own if Louis doesn’t want to come.

The following week, Calum skips footie practice one afternoon to cut class with Michael. “Come on,” he says, hurriedly emptying the contents of his and Michael’s locker into his backpack. “Mali’s waiting for us in the parking lot. We can get a McDonald’s and go to the beach again.” Michael leans against the locker next to theirs. He’s all for cutting class - he especially doesn’t want to go to music; it had been hard enough to face Ashton the first day after the weekend, let alone all week - but he has a distinctly bad feeling about this excursion. It’s not like Calum and Mali to skip class together with their very different schedules. His stomach drops.

“I don’t know,” Michael goes. “I don’t think this is a good idea.”

Calum slams the locker door shut and shoulders his backpack along with his footie kit. “Will you just come on,” Calum says again, tugging at Michael’s arm until he gives in. They walk out through the music corridor; the music and art teachers don’t give a shit who skips their classes, so it’s the safest exit route to the parking lot. As promised, Mali is waiting in the parking lot with the engine running. She’s wearing one of her mum’s floppy sun hats to poorly disguise herself. It’s probably a good idea - she only graduated two years ahead of them, so there is a very good chance that one of her old teachers might recognize her and rat them out to Joy. Michael’s mum doesn’t care if he skips class or not. She always tells him that it’s up to him to decide his attitude towards his education, which is mostly the reason he’s failing maths and on the verge of failing history. She might have thought it would give him a kick in the ass and get him to start going to class more often if she acted like she didn’t care, but it’s had the opposite effect. Now he doesn’t care twice as hard and it’s so much easier some days to skip class when he doesn’t feel like going.

As they’re pulling out of the student parking lot Mali brakes abruptly and says, “Mikey. Seatbelt.” Grumbling under his breath Michael clicks the seatbelt firmly into place, feeling moderately chastised. Once she’s satisfied that he’s properly buckled in, Mali turns the stereo on and Avril Lavigne comes blaring through the speakers, prompting a groan from Calum. “My car, my rules,” Mali tells him coolly. “Once you get your license you can decide what to listen to in the car.”

“Not fair,” Calum mutters. He sings along to ‘Mobile’ in an annoying voice. Michael considers teasing him about how he knows all the words, but he knows better than to open that can of worms when he’s already on thin ice with his best friend. He knows they’re in a non-fight because Calum moved him to the end of his Myspace Top 8, which is almost worse than being taken out altogether. He half wonders if that’s why they are skipping class together. Then he thinks better of it, because people who are mad at their best friends definitely do not drag the aforementioned friend out to the beach to skive off classes for the afternoon.

Maybe Michael is just on edge because the last time he got roped into going to the beach with them he got unceremoniously dumped off at a support group he never wanted to go to while everyone else got to have fun. He’s still slightly bitter about it. The only good thing that came out of that afternoon was meeting Luke; even now he’s not sure if it’s a good thing since now Calum is all pissed off about that. “So what are we doing?” Michael asks cautiously while they’re waiting in the queue for the McDonald’s drive-thru. And Mali shushes him like she always does when they pull up to the speaker to order. He repeats the question once they’ve driven up to the first window. “Seriously, what are we doing after this?”

Instead of answering, Calum turns Avril Lavigne up as they head for the highway that leads to the beach. That’s never a good sign.

Michael plucks at a loose thread on the hem of his t-shirt uncomfortably. It’s not like Calum to hide something he’s upset about. He’s pretty sure he’s fucked up royally, this time, and he’s pretty sure that this is going to turn into a friendship break-up conversation. The anxiety spirals inside his head as he struggles to rationalize: If Calum were truly friendship breaking-up with him he wouldn’t have brought his sister along who is one of Michael’s oldest friends, they wouldn’t be driving all the way out to the beach to do it. When they park in the lot he slips out of his battered Vans and leaves them on the floor of Mali’s car and follows the siblings down to the sand.

“I just feel like we haven’t hung out that much lately,” Calum tells him. “I feel like I’ve been a bad friend.”

“You haven’t been,” Michael assures him. The awkwardness hangs between them for a moment. To try and dissipate it Michael punches Calum in the arm and takes off at a full-speed run toward the water shouting, “Last one to the water is a total loser!” For that brief moment when the wind is whipping in his ears and he’s sprinting across the hot sand it feels like everything’s going to turn out okay. The thing is, this feels like the set-up for an after school special. He doesn’t need a serious conversation about what’s going on with him or anything. He’s just kind of going through some stuff right now and he’d rather hang out in his bedroom and go on Myspace than talk about it. He’d rather make out with Luke - who he’s not even sure he likes like that - than have to think about all the stuff that happened with Ashton, and every song he’s tried to write recently has turned out awful so he’s pretty sure his aspiration of getting their band signed has been shot to hell.

He hits the water and immediately regrets it as the waves crash over him, soaking him from head to toe. A few meters away from him Calum is spluttering similarly and treading water. “You’re a dick,” Calum gasps, swimming over toward him as Mali stands at the edge of the water laughing and taking pictures with her digital camera. He splashes fruitlessly at Michael, paddling steadily until he’s close enough to throw his arms over Michael’s shoulders in an attempt to dunk him back under the water. Michael yelps and jerks away, floundering in the opposite direction as far as he can.

He ends up swallowing a lungful of sea water and coughs it all up, muttering a steady chorus of ‘Fuck’ under his breath. “Let’s go get dry,” he suggests, frowning at the way his shirt is stuck to his torso. He hates that it clings to the slight belly he’s been developing. Calum trails after him, similarly dripping wet by the time they return to the sand but less bothered by it.

“What’s up with you lately? You’ve been super distant,” Calum wants to know as they walk back across the sand to the boardwalk. Sand clings to their damp legs and feet, coating the spaces between toes and above the notches of their ankles and all along Calum’s sparse leg hair. Michael rolls his eyes. It hasn’t been any one thing. He’s just felt… kind of shitty. He’s about to vocalize this when Mali appears with icy poles for all of them. The momentary distraction is greatly appreciated - also, she’s gotten him the lime-flavored one, which is his favorite. The cold treat is nice almost in spite of the afternoon sun and the cement burning the soles of their feet.

“I haven’t been distant. Just… Kind of a lot going on right now,” Michael says nonchalantly. He doesn’t really want to get into it. The answer doesn’t satisfy Calum, though, who nudges at Michael with his elbow until Michael gets frustrated and continues grasping at straws for an explanation of his recent behavior. “I’m, like… Is this about the Luke thing? Because I kind of thought you’d understand, about that,” he bitches. “You’re supposed to be my best friend. You’re supposed to be okay with this.” It sounds shitty when he says it and he doesn’t take it back immediately the way he normally would. Michael’s not good at choosing his words in non-arguments; he’s impulsive and prone to anger and he’ll stand his ground until he can’t anymore even if he knows he’s wrong.

Calum furrows his eyebrows. “I’m not saying don’t go out with guys or whatever,” he goes, before biting the remains of his icy pole in half. “It’s just kind of weird seeing you make out with some random guy you don’t even know. I mean, he’s not even your type. And your whole hiding out in your bedroom routine is getting real old.”

“I haven’t been ‘hiding out’ in my bedroom,” Michael gripes. “You’ve been too busy with fucking footie to make any time for me. In case you hadn’t noticed, I still show up at your house pretty much every day after school and you’re never there. And when you are there all you want to talk about is ‘footie, footie, fuckin’ footie, lads,’ and it’s like you don’t realize that other people have real problems,” he spits out. He doesn’t realize that he’s been pulling too hard on his jelly bracelets in his frustration until one of them snaps and falls to the ground. “Fuck,” he shouts, kicking out at one of the light posts that line the boardwalk.

“Oh my god. What problems do you even have besides your boyfriend breaking up with you because he didn’t want to come out of the closet?” Calum shoots back. “Fuckin’, like, counting the dollars in your bank account while you piss away your chances at going to uni by skipping class all the time and not doing any work? News flash: Some of us are relying on a fucking soccer scholarship to go to uni while you’re sitting around on Myspace sucking your own dick.” Michael hadn’t been looking at it that way - because he had been focused on his own hurt feelings. Even though Calum’s right - and it is not a surprise to him that Calum plans on going to uni, that is not new information by any stretch of the imagination - he had been ignoring it, pretending it wasn’t going to happen because he’s not ready to lose his only true friend. He hates high school, but he also doesn’t want it to be over this soon. He doesn’t want to be all alone.

Michael definitely doesn’t want to be having this conversation. “Maybe my problem is that you’re trying so hard to act like you don’t give a shit what people think but you spend your time constantly trying to please other people. And like, maybe if you’re so worried about that you just shouldn’t be friends with me anymore. Because it’s not exactly a secret that nobody likes me. Do you think I don’t know the way people talk about me behind my back?”

“I always defended you,” Calum hisses. “Always.”

“I don’t need your pity!” Michael snaps. He’s getting pissed off and he can feel his throat tightening as he tries not to cry. He balls his fists up at his sides and bites the inside of his cheek hard. Before anyone can say anything else he stalks past Mali and goes to the car. It’s easy to reach in the driver’s side window and pop the lock open, grab his things out of the back seat and storm off to the canteen where there’s a bank of payphones around the side. He can hear Calum and Mali calling after him but he’s too furious to have anything to do with them right now. Instead he feeds the pay phone with quarters and calls for a cab, digging through his backpack to find his wallet. It’s at the bottom, of course, bills crumpled in the billfold because he’s too careless to smooth them out when he puts change away. He sits at one of the patio tables with the garishly colored umbrellas while he waits for the cab to pick him up, stubbornly shoving his earbuds into both ears so no one will try to talk to him.

He keeps the earbuds in the whole ride home, too. It ends up costing him thirty dollars but it’s worth the money not having to speak to anyone the whole way. When he goes inside his mum is home, calmly chopping vegetables for a salad. “You’re home early,” she comments upon hearing the door slam shut behind Michael. As much as he’s not in the mood to talk, his mum hasn’t done anything to him so he hovers in the front hallway dripping all over the carpet. “You’re soaking wet,” she sighs, setting the paring knife on the counter.

“I had a fight with Calum,” he tells his mum sulkily. “Everything is terrible.”

“He’s your best friend,” she reminds him. “You and Calum will make up eventually. You always do. Now go change out of those wet clothes before you catch a cold,” and she goes back to chopping vegetables as Michael stomps down the stairs to the laundry room and wrestles himself out of his waterlogged t-shirt and shorts. He feels like his mum should have slightly more sympathy toward his problems, especially seeing as he’s in an official fight with his best friend and he’s had a terrible day altogether. Rather than going back upstairs he shuts himself in his room with the lights turned off and lies face-down on his bed, wondering when his life became such a miserable existence. He thinks that getting not-broken up with by Ashton might have hurt less than this. Like, at least there wasn’t such an established history there. Fighting with Calum makes him feel slightly like he’s missing a limb.

He lies on the bed until he feels much calmer and then goes onto Myspace, seeking something to listen to that will help his wounded ego. He sees that Calum is online and logged into AIM, but he’s got his status set as ‘Away’ and no away message saved. That means he’s online but pretending not to be, or more likely doing homework, but Michael doesn’t want to be the one to talk first for once. He IMs Luke instead, asking how his day is going and if he has any plans for the weekend. Luke almost never replies to his messages immediately, but Michael is okay with that because he knows that Luke is doing this weird homeschool thing. A lot of the time that he’s online he’s doing schoolwork. While he himself has a lot of disdain for the education system, Michael can respect someone who genuinely puts effort into their schooling.

Out of habit he clicks on Ashton’s Myspace profile and waits for it to load, holding his breath. Nothing has changed: No status update, no blog posts, nothing. The only comments on his profile are the ones Michael had written almost three months ago and the occasional ‘Send this to twenty of your closest friends within 7 minutes or your mum will die’ chain message. The ‘Online Now!’ marker on Calum’s profile is on, which makes Michael irrationally pissed off. He goes onto Calum’s profile and sees that his Top 8 has changed and that he’s no longer in it. That feels like the tipping point of the end of their friendship. Michael goes into his own profile editor and removes Calum from his own Top Friends, replaces him with that asthmatic girl from his chemistry class last year. That will show Calum how he really feels.

He changes the song on his profile, too. There’s a song from Taking Back Sunday’s last album that perfectly captures his feelings of betrayal and abandonment. He puts it on at full blast, singing along to ‘There’s No “I” in Team’ until his mother starts to pound on the floor so he’ll turn the volume down a bit. It makes him feel the tiniest bit better to scream along to the lyrics “Best friends means I pull the trigger, best friends means you get what you deserve” until he starts feeling like they mean something.

It doesn’t get any better. Michael finds himself restless by the time the weekend rolls around. He can’t hang out with Calum because they’re in a fight and Luke is out of town for some family thing, so he’s all by himself for the first time in a while. That doesn’t leave him with a lot of options. He thinks about hanging out with Mali but feels like that would create a weird inequality, not to mention it would force Mali to choose between him and her own brother. He knows better than to start that kind of fight unless he’s absolutely certain he doesn’t want to be friends with Calum ever again.

The only thing left for him to do is go to the skate park. He hasn’t been hanging around there a lot recently; he’s come to terms with the fact that he’s never going to be a phenomenal skateboarder and it brings up unpleasant associations with his relationship with Ashton. On Saturday afternoon he decides he’s had enough of hiding out in his bedroom and forces himself to get out of bed. He can go to the skate park. He gets dressed and puts on his shoes. It feels like his arms and legs are made out of wood. The sunlight on his skin when he steps outside should feel good, but it doesn’t. It feels too bright and it stings his eyes. He wishes he’d worn his shitty fake Ray-Bans by the time he gets to the stop sign on the corner, but he soldiers on with the mindset that things will feel better if he gets away from the house for a while. Sitting in the dark on his computer stalking everyone on Myspace isn’t doing him a bit of good. Actual human interaction could be good for him, in theory.

He ignores the shitty comments from the thirteen year olds who have claimed the park for the afternoon. When they keep yelling insults at him, calling him gay and throwing things at him as he walks by, he turns to them and goes, “Yeah, I fucking am gay. Let me know when your balls have dropped and then you can start worrying about me being attracted to you,” and then he drops his board on the ground and pushes off angrily, wondering when this shit is supposed to get any better. Because it’s certainly not getting better right now and he doesn’t believe anyone who says that these are supposed to be the best years of his life.

Without Calum to cheer him on he doesn’t feel like working on any flashy tricks. He just pushes himself along aimlessly until he stumbles. Upon the first meeting of his knees with the cement he decides that it’s not worth it anymore and he sits against the crooked line of the chain link fence instead, watching the shitty thirteen year olds make themselves look like idiots trying to do tricks they haven’t got the first idea how to execute properly. That’s how he knows it’s getting bad. He doesn’t feel like skateboarding, doesn’t even feel like playing his guitar or listening to music lately. He pulls his iPod out of his shorts pocket and goes through the albums he’s put on it. None of them catch his attention anyway.

Half an hour after he’s arrived at the skate park he decides to pack it in and go home. He climbs to his feet slowly, feeling each pop and crack of his joints complaining as he stands. When did he start feeling so old all the time? he wonders. He flips the tweens off as he skates past them, doing a quick nosegrind on the curb before landing on the even surface of the road. As he’s about to push off from the curb he misjudges it and tumbles to his knees, sending his board careening across the road. His palms catch the brunt of his fall. Thankfully his wounds seem to be limited to superficial scrapes. He’s collecting himself and getting back on his feet to locate his board when an all-too-familiar voice says, “Hey. Are you okay?”

Michael’s heart feels like it’s about to slither out of his chest and splatter itself all across the street. “Oh,” he says flatly. “Of course it’s you.”

His palms are bloodied and raw as he snatches the board out of Ashton’s hands. “You just seem like you’re having a rough day,” Ashton tells him. “I thought we could talk. Like we used to.” It’s such poor timing that Michael kind of wants to spit in his face. He doesn’t, of course, no matter how much he may want to. But for a moment he lets himself visualize it anyway. The worst part of it is that he finds himself wanting to talk to Ashton, wanting to crawl back to him and beg to be taken back even though he knows it’s probably the worst thing for him right now, and it stings. It stings that he can be so in love with Ashton still and it stings even more knowing that Ashton doesn’t feel the same way. He wants to be mean about it. He wants to be as mean and shitty as he had been to the thirteen year olds, as shitty as he had been to Calum. He can’t.

“Now isn’t a good time,” he croaks. Because when has Ashton done anything to deserve a second of his time? When has Ashton done anything other than run away, other than try to hide throughout their whole not-relationship? Michael can feel the crying coming. Before it can happen he takes off on his board, as fast as he can go without falling, leaving Ashton behind to goggle at his sudden departure. What makes Ashton think that he even wants to talk? He’s had enough of the pity parade. He’s had enough of people doing shitty things to him and then coming back later like it doesn’t matter and he’s not supposed to feel hurt anymore. He certainly doesn’t need Ashton looking at him through his eyelashes like everything’s okay. Like his heart hadn’t just been viciously stomped on and Calum won’t answer his IMs and the only person in the entire universe who cares what he has to say is gone for the whole weekend.

The tears are streaking down his cheeks by the time he gets home, pooling at the corners of his mouth and then dripping down his chin. He feels like - like smashing his guitar, or something, the way all his dreams have been smashed to bits by the people around him. When he gets to his bedroom he looks at his guitar but even the effort required to lift it from its stand feels like too much. Defeated, he flops onto his bed and pulls the covers up over his head. He’s about to get up and put a CD in the stereo when the doorbell rings. If it were Calum or Mali they would’ve just let themselves in - they both know where the spare key is hidden - so he drags himself out of bed for the second time that day and up the stairs to the main floor. He hadn’t bothered to get undressed when he’d come home so at least he’s spared himself the embarrassment of answering the door in his underwear. It’s not nice to answer the door all tear-stained and snot-nosed but he does it anyways. He’ll turn away whatever pamphlet-waving religious sect has come to the door and he’ll go back downstairs to his room and drown himself in his sorrows to the sounds of My Chemical Romance.

The door swings open noiselessly on its hinges. Ashton’s standing on his doorstep with the earphones he hadn’t even realized had fallen out of his pocket carefully wound up. It’s a sincere gesture, but the timing of it absolutely sucks. “I thought you’d want these back,” Ashton tells him. Michael drags the back of his hand across his eyes quickly and leans against the door.

Now probably isn’t a good time to mention that he could just as easily have gotten a new pair since he loses them, like, all the time. Instead he says, “Thank you,” and takes them back carefully.

He goes to close the door but then Ashton’s poking his leg through the crack so it catches in the crook of his ankle. “Mikey,” he sighs. “Don’t shut me out, okay? I know you’re fighting with Calum and you’ve looked so unhappy lately that I thought I should at least try to talk to you about it.” Even though he feels like it’s a bad idea Michael doesn’t shut the door. He’s too tired of fighting with everyone and feeling ignored to shut the door on someone who’s genuinely noticing the shitty time he’s having with everything in his life right now, even if it’s someone who has hurt him in the past. After all, people can change. It’s just awkward because the last - and only - time Ashton has ever been in his house was that time. Like. The time that sex things happened and Michael basically considers to have been the loss of his virginity. It’s hard not to think about that.

“How did you know I was fighting with Calum?” Michael asks cautiously. He decides that maybe it won’t be so bad if they just stick to the upstairs. His mum would understand, he thinks, or at least he won’t usher them out with the same tenacity that she sends him and Calum downstairs because Ashton is all respectable and well-mannered and shit. Except for the whole crushing fragile teenage hearts thing, which Michael is trying super hard not to be bitter about at the moment.

Ashton’s cheeks color for a second before he ducks his head and goes, “I saw your Myspace and then his and, um, I know that Brand New songs are kind of a serious thing.” His gaze remains steadily on his bare feet on the parquet flooring instead of meeting Michael’s eyes. Apparently neither of them are going to touch on the last event in Michael’s life that involved a Brand New song. It’s probably for the best.

“Yeah, uh, we’re not speaking to each other right now and it’s super weird.”

“At least you have Luke, though, right?” Ashton asks, and it feels from the start like a baited question.

Michael doesn’t answer for a minute. “I mean - I, that’s the whole reason me and Cal are even in this stupid fight,” he blurts out. As soon as the words have left his mouth he wishes he could take them back. He doesn’t want to project an air of outward annoyed-with-Luke-ness because the Luke thing is only a small part of the reason he and Calum are fighting. But he doesn’t think it’s particularly tactful to bring up the whole ‘Calum is mad at me because my family is somewhat wealthy and also I’m failing my classes and I’m sinking into a horrible, all-consuming despair’ thing the first time they’ve had a real, non-awkward conversation since their non-breakup. To kill some of the awkwardness he offers, “Do you want a pizza pocket or something?”

“Um, sure?” Michael busies himself with the microwave for a minute, far too conscious of Ashton leaning against the counter and watching him like months haven’t gone by since the last time they were like this. The act of pressing the buttons for the right amount of time - and Michael’s not, like, bragging or anything but he makes a pretty mean pizza pocket - is a placeholder in the conversation. And the drawn-out sigh that Ashton lets out before he speaks is not a good sign. “So this you and Luke thing,” Ashton goes. “Is it pretty serious, or is it like - I mean, you’re fighting with Calum over him.”

“I don’t know,” Michael admits. “We’re just hanging out. It’s fun.” God, does he ever hate how that sounds. It makes him sound like he’s some mindless skank who just makes out with any guy who will have him, and he’s not. The statement immediately makes him want to shove his fist in his own mouth and pull out his vocal cords before he can say anything else stupid. He likes Luke well enough. He doesn’t know if Luke is boyfriend material - he’s leaning strongly towards not, though - but since Ashton already thinks that Luke is his boyfriend he has to go along with it or else get caught in his own stupid lie.

Still, Ashton frowns at him and tells him, “I don’t like seeing you with him.”

Knee-jerk reaction for Michael is to say, “I don’t care.” Then he shakes his head and adds, “Sorry. That was mean. I mean, I’m happy, though.” He doesn’t add that technically, Ashton’s not allowed to give a shit who he dates anymore. He is trying to be diplomatic because he has no idea how to get Ashton out of his kitchen or how to end this conversation with something that doesn’t closely resemble groveling at Ashton’s feet and begging to be taken back.

“Can we talk about this?” Ashton says.

“There’s nothing to talk about. I appreciate your concern,” Michael says very carefully, “but there’s nothing you can say that will take back any of the stuff that happened. I’m with Luke. Calum is pissed about it and I don’t know what I’m going to do about it and I’m not sorry about it.” He’s pissed off that Ashton only ever wants him when there doesn’t have to be a label on it. He’s pissed off that Ashton has had months to say he’s sorry for what happened and he’s still not saying it. He’s only here because he’s jealous but he’ll never admit that he’s jealous, and that pisses Michael the fuck off too. He’s tired of feeling like everyone’s last resort.

“You don’t even like him,” Ashton points out. And Michael can tolerate a lot of things - has tolerated a lot of things, especially coming from Ashton - but this is kind of an asshole thing to say. He hasn’t even had the time to figure out if he does like Luke properly or not. Everyone is descending upon him like he’s an actual hellspawn for maybe kind of liking Luke but where were they when everything with Ashton was happening? Where was everyone during that? For as much as everyone in Michael’s life seems to like pointing the finger, they’re hopelessly blind when it comes to his actual feelings. There’s no other excuse for the way they ignore his deepening feelings of hopelessness. It feels like he’s drowning in the middle of this very room with Ashton watching him.

He takes in a deep breath, holds it in until his lungs feel like they’re going to explode. “Can you please just go,” he says quietly.

“Fine,” Ashton says back. More than anything he seems annoyed that Michael isn’t happy to see him. Just. Why would he be interested in rekindling their relationship this long after everything? It’s so fucking selfish. Michael waits until he’s heard the door close before sinking slowly to the floor. The microwave timer had beeped at some point during their exchange but he’s no longer hungry after everything that had been said.

Michael leans back against the dishwasher and cries. It doesn’t seem fair that everything is going wrong in his life this way. He doesn’t know how long he stays on the kitchen floor crying like that. It’s long enough that his mum comes home and finds him like that, lying on the cold tiles sobbing into his arms soundlessly. When she asks him what’s wrong he doesn’t know what to say at all, just sobs, “Everything is terrible,” and clutches at his mum’s legs like he did when he was a little kid and didn’t want to be left at daycare without her. And his mum takes the ruined pizza pockets out of the microwave and throws them away without commentary for maybe the first time in his entire life about wasting food.

Somehow his mum manages to get him propped up on the couch under a blanket without any difficulty despite the six or so inches he has on her, height-wise. She drapes the blanket over him and ruffles his hair and asks, “What’s happened?”

He doesn’t feel up to relating the whole messy tale from beginning to end. He shakes his head and tells her, “I had a fight with Calum and everything is going to be terrible forever,” and then a fresh round of tears begins so all he can do is lie on the couch and rub at his eyes until they feel raw. Because he can’t just tell his mum about all the stuff with Ashton; it’s not that he doesn’t want her to know, ever, it’s just painful and freshly embarrassing to even think about at the moment. He thinks his mum must know that the issue goes much deeper than that, because she leaves the house shortly after he’s set up on the couch and returns with an Indian takeaway. It’s the nicest thing anyone has done for him in the last while. “Thank you,” he sniffles when she brings plates and glasses into the living room. She’s even gotten him an extra thing of papadums, which makes him cry even more when ordinarily it would make him happy. The gesture is appreciated; still, it does nothing to fill in the emotional wounds Michael is suffering from.

On the first week of Warped Tour, Luke finally caves and lets Michael dye his hair. They do it in a kiddie pool someone has brought. He’s careful to paint a thick strip of conditioner around Luke’s ears and hairline before applying the dye, then he liberally coats his best friend’s virgin blond hair in Manic Panic Voodoo Blue. “I can’t believe I’m letting you do this,” Luke grumbles. To his credit he’s doing a good job of sitting perfectly still on the folding chair someone has lent them for the occasion. He’s also doing a good job of holding the bowl they had slopped it into without getting any on his hands, either. Calum’s sitting on top of a hard plastic cooler drinking a beer even though it’s before noon. “My mum is going to kill me,” Luke continues.

“It will wash out,” Michael tells him. Unless it doesn’t, he thinks to himself. Once he’s satisfied that every strand of Luke’s golden locks are saturated in vibrant blue, he lathers the dye on his head and says, “Now sit still so you don’t get it on your shirt.” He’s pretty sure that he’s accidentally dyed one of Luke’s earlobes blue, too. He doesn’t mention it out loud, figuring that it will wash away when they shampoo in half an hour. He’s had bleach sitting on his own head for almost half an hour now. The sensitive skin on his scalp tingles - between the bleach baking in the sun and the makeshift dye cap they’d made out of a plastic bag his head is uncomfortably warm. Probably he can leave it for about ten more minutes before he gives himself chemical burns. For the next three weeks his scalp will be dry and flaky - he knows this, accepts this, accepts that it is bad for his hair - and then his roots will start growing in enough to be noticeable and they will repeat the whole process. Calum hands him a beer dutifully and he cracks the top on it, figuring that he can probably finish drinking it in the time it takes for his hair to finish cooking.

It’s not like he’s timing it or anything. It’s not a very exact process. By the time he’s finished the lukewarm beer his scalp is on fire. The water that comes out of the hose is ice-cold. It feels so good that he lets out an involuntary moan. “Kinky,” Calum comments. He angles the hose over Michael’s head while he scrubs shampoo and a large amount of conditioner through his hair. Michael’s pretty sure if he bleaches his hair any more this summer, it’s going to start falling out. It feels hard and crispy. He piles conditioner onto his head with the intention to let it sit for a few minutes and have another drink, then snatches the hose away from Calum and shoves it down the front of Calum’s shorts. “What the fuck,” Calum yelps, tripping backwards over the cooler and falling flat on his ass. Luke hides a snicker behind his hand.

To recover some of his dignity Calum takes the hose back and sprays it at Michael, holding his thumb over the opening to make a higher-pressure spray. “You dick,” Michael shrieks. The water soaks through his thin t-shirt. The wet fabric clings to his body; the shirt he wears for bleaching and dyeing his hair is a holdover from when he was twelve. It’s not the most flattering shirt on him. When it’s wet it has a tendency to ride up, exposing his stomach and back. They squabble over the hose for a few minutes, running around the inflatable kiddie pool and spraying each other with the hose until they’re both soaked. Finally, Calum pushes Michael back into the pool and he splutters indignantly for a moment, conditioner-saturated water dripping into his eyes from his fringe.

“I didn’t know we were having a wet t-shirt contest,” Luke quips, taking the hose from Calum to rinse the conditioner out of Michael’s hair for him. His fingernails are the perfect combination of gentle and scratchy as he patiently massages Michael’s scalp, making sure there are no traces of conditioner left by the time he’s done. Calum stands at the edge of the pool, hovering, and it’s clear to Michael that jealousy is radiating from him. As always, Luke is completely oblivious to his bandmate’s poorly concealed emotions; he’s still convinced that Calum dislikes him. Actually, Calum is probably still convinced that he hates Luke, too.

Michael’s basically the greatest friend ever for not calling Calum out on the ridiculous way he deals with his feelings for Luke. “Yeah, yeah, good to see you’re all jokes,” Michael grumbles. Luke’s the only one still wearing a shirt - he’s not a big fan of the whole shirtless thing still, not to mention the one and only time they’ve been to the beach together the sunburn that Luke had managed to get made him strongly resemble Deadpool for a few days. Not that that’s a terrible thing, but like. Sunburns peeling hurt. Michael peers at Luke’s head, pushing the dye-coated strands aside with a single fingertip to check whether the dye has soaked into the follicles enough yet. There’s a good chance they’ve dyed his scalp by accident, but it will be fine. Probably. There’s also a good chance that they’ve ruined the back of Luke’s shirt - he can see where dye has dripped down the back of Luke’s neck and stained the neckline of the shirt. Maybe they can save it by cutting it at the seams. Removing the neck band wouldn’t totally ruin the shirt, he reasons with himself. He can call it fashion and no one ever has to know.

“Can we rinse this out now?” Luke wants to know.

“Take your shirt off first,” Michael tells him. And helps Luke wrestle out of his t-shirt carefully to avoid getting even more hair dye on it; in the end they pull it over his head with only a small spot in the middle of it which will probably come out in the wash. Luke plunks himself down in the middle of the pool, looking comically large with his back to the smiling whale face at the edge of the pool’s vinyl sides. They all three have worn their swim trunks in anticipation of sitting in the water and drinking until it’s time for their set later on that day. Calum’s very pointedly looking down at his phone while this takes place. Michael carefully rinses the blue out of Luke’s hair while he shields his eyes, rubbing the hair with his fingers until the water runs mostly clear before adding a tiny bit of shampoo to wash any dye still clinging to Luke’s scalp away.

When the water finally goes clear it’s obvious that they’ve made a mistake in their calculations of how long the dye would need to process. “Is it… supposed to be that color?” Calum asks. What was supposed to be a nice, deeply saturated blue has ended up almost... pastel.

Luke stares up at them with wide, horrified eyes. “Is it awful?”

“I think we should have left it on for longer,” Michael says. He runs his fingers through Luke’s damp hair, wondering if they have time to do a second application without Luke ending up looking like a Smurf when the color inevitably runs and mingles with his sweat. “It’s fine,” he reassures Luke. “We can redo it and leave it for longer if you really don’t like it.” Or, he considers, maybe this is the universe’s way of telling him that they should never do this again so Liz doesn’t murder him when she sees pictures of her son with blue hair.

After a moment looking at his reflection in the van’s side mirror, Luke sighs and pulls his shirt back on. “It’s not that bad,” he says. And Michael almost doesn’t know why he was so worried - nothing ever seems to phase Luke. He’s taking this in the same unassuming way he takes everything; a moment later he says, “Alright, your turn,” and makes Michael sit on the folding chair while he paints Electric Amethyst dye into his over-processed hair. No one bothers to shield Michael’s neck or hairline from the dye. Admittedly Luke is less skillful with a tint brush than he is, but he’ll take having the tips of his ears or the back of his neck stained over having to do it all himself. They cram themselves into the pool after it’s done, each claiming a third of the pool for themselves to cool off in the shade.

They sit there until Michael’s hair is obnoxiously purple and Calum rinses the color out while Luke laughs and tries to avoid the spray from the hose. As they’re finishing up with the conditioner - which is doing absolutely nothing to salvage the condition of Michael’s hair at this point - Michael hears a familiar voice in the distance and he immediately stiffens where he’s sitting. Not in a sex way - he’s gritting his teeth and trying to become invisible. “Hey, a pool party!” someone says, and Alex laughs, and Michael sinks lower behind the inflatable whale’s smiling face.

“Fancy seeing you here,” Alex says, making direct eye contact. A challenge, maybe, or an invitation. Michael suddenly feels very under-dressed. He’s too aware of his t-shirt being damp and sticking to his torso, of Alex’s eyes following the line from his shoulder to his hip. “Nice pool,” Alex adds.

“It’s a whale of a time,” Luke says, laughing at his own joke. Calum rolls his eyes and looks sulky.

Michael considers faking an incurable illness to get out of the situation. He doesn’t want to start up that whole thing with Alex again; on a tour with just three bands it might have been okay, but the problem with Warped is that everything is so transparent. Like, there’s a chance that Lisa could show up mid-tour or something. He doesn’t want to get caught in someone else’s relationship drama. The thing is that Alex Gaskarth is not great at taking ‘no’ for an answer. It’s harder to say no since they had something going before, so he’s going to need a very good reason why he can’t do it again. This would be a lot easier if Michael were a good liar. He swishes his feet under the water, bumping them up against Calum’s legs.

“Hey,” Calum says. “Isn’t that Bryan Stars coming this way?” He points somewhere to their left, squinting slightly and cupping his other hand over his eyes to keep the glare off the fleet of parked vehicles out of his eyes for a moment. Michael hopes that Bryan Stars isn’t actually coming. There’s no one more annoying in possibly the entire universe. Later they will find someone more annoying - Gunz, of the Gunz Show fame on Idobi radio - but at this juncture everyone knows to avoid Bryan Stars. But whether it’s true or not, Calum’s trick works. Alex stands on his toes, trying to seem like he’s acting casual while also scanning the people walking up and down the aisle of parked vans.

Alex crouches down behind the inflatable whale’s tail. “You haven’t seen us,” he stage-whispers. His guitar tech Danny nods. “We’re not here.”

Calum pretends to be squinting even harder and goes, “Yeah, he’s definitely coming this way. Run while you still can.” Michael considers buying him a Friend of the Year trophy, or at least one half of a set of those ‘Best Friends’ bracelets from Claire’s or something. Luke reaches for one of the beach towels they’d stolen from a twenty-four Walmart at four in the morning and stands, drying himself off as best he can with the cheap palm tree-printed fabric.

“We should start getting ready for that signing thing,” Luke says, toweling his pale blue hair dry. The color looks better once it’s dried; Michael feels a wave of relief flood him. He’s glad he didn’t totally fuck one of his best friends’ hair up. That would have been embarrassing and, also, Liz would have murdered him. This just looks cool and kind of intentional. He’s pretty sure they don’t have a signing today. No one says anything about it. Calum goes around to the back of their van and digs through the duffle bags for clothes for everyone and Michael makes a fumbling excuse about being sorry while he dries himself off. The way Alex is looking at him makes him feel too hot, like his skin is too tight. He’s grateful to have friends who have his back, even if the situation stems completely from his own indiscretions and ability to say ‘no’ to people.

“Right,” Michael says finally. “Well. I guess I’ll see you around, or… Or something,” he stammers. Calum clears his throat and pointedly taps his wrist in a very his mom-ish ‘We’re going to be late if we do not leave right this very second, so help me God’ gesture. He takes the clothes that Calum shoves at his chest and strips out of his wet t-shirt, drapes it over the back of the borrowed folding chair and pulls on the dry one instead. The swim trunks are probably okay to wear, he figures, and also he doesn’t want to be bare-ass naked in front of Alex - or anyone, really - because that lends a level of familiarity and expectation that he’s not comfortable with. Plus he doesn’t want to give Alex any kind of weird, like, fapping material in the form of his unclothed body.

Luke tugs on Michael’s arm and goes, “Come on,” in the whiniest tone of voice he can muster.

Alex just looks at him and says, “What, no hug?”

Which of course makes Michael an asshole for refusing the hug - because it could be just a friendly hug - so he kind of has to allow the hug. “Sure,” Michael sighs. He does the classic one-armed ‘I don’t want to be hugging you and would rather be devoured whole by snakes’ hug, which Alex doesn’t seem to recognize. Alex doesn’t seem to have changed or matured at all from last year. The hug goes on for far longer than Michael would actually like, during which time his upper body is mashed against Alex’s and the more he tries to angle his crotch away, the closer Alex’s comes toward him. “I’ll see you later,” Michael says, conceding defeat. He finishes it with a sturdy shoulder pat, hoping that through the haphazard collection of body language signals he’s been sending it’s been made clear that he doesn’t want to meet up for kisses, or whatever.

As they’re walking towards the catering tent - because Calum is nothing if not predictable - Michael thinks meanly that he hopes Bryan Stars finds Alex and subjects him to an uncomfortable interview question. Or ten. “Man, fuck that guy,” Luke says crossly. “Everyone knows he has a girlfriend.” Calum nods in agreement. They link arms as they walk, an unstoppable force of hunger and mild drunkenness. Michael feels so secure with his boys on either side of him, supporting him and loving him even though they don’t necessarily understand him at times. He feels good. Better. 

Michael’s mum lets him stay home for the whole of the next week. He’s pretty sure that it’s a pity thing; the first day she comes down to his room, feels his forehead and tells him to go back to bed. Never one to overlook an opportunity to miss school - which he well and truly despises - Michael proceeds to sleep all day and wake up long after his mum has gotten home from work that evening. The rest of the days blend together in a similar haze leading into the weekend. Every once in a while his computer speakers emit a cheerful ding!, letting him know that he’s got new instant messages. He doesn’t check them. What’s the point? He doesn’t want to hear about how well his friends’ lives are going without him. This, he thinks, probably makes him a shitty not-boyfriend to Luke. He knows it’s irrational to be upset that Luke hadn’t answered his IMs because of a family obligation, but he’s cranky and lonely and he’s tired of being pushed to the side for other things.

He takes his meals in his bedroom, too, and watches the first two seasons of _Digimon_ on VHS until he has dreams about living in the Digital World. By Friday night there’s a stack of plates on his desk, a thin layer of Cheetos dust over the keyboard. Because while he hasn’t been checking his IMs, he has been playing a hell of a lot of WoW. It’s been six days since he went outside or left his room for anything other than to take a piss. It doesn’t feel great. Michael keeps wondering what the hell his problem is. It wouldn’t take that much for him to take the stack of plates upstairs and put them in the dishwasher. He keeps looking at them and feeling a hollow, guilty void in between his ribcage where his heart should be. So the dishes keep piling up next to the empty glasses next to the empty Cheetos bag and everything builds to the point where on Friday night when he wakes up, he doesn’t even bother to get out of bed at all.

It’s a cycle that feeds into itself indefinitely. He knows what he’s doing is not healthy. It’s impossible for him not to know - his mum had popped down earlier in the week to remind him about the dishes and he had grumbled something into his pillow and gone back to sleep.

On Saturday he doesn’t feel any more optimistic. He wakes up in the early afternoon hours; at least he thinks it’s early afternoon from the sunlight filtering weakly through the cracks in the blinds. And he thinks about getting out of bed and taking the first shower he’ll have taken this week, but he can’t muster up the effort required. He’s vaguely aware of the sound of footsteps upstairs. It’s not surprising considering that it’s the weekend but his mum usually treads softer on the parquets. Something about scuffing the expensive floors that costs more than his education, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe she got some new shoes and is breaking them in, he thinks groggily. It sounds like a parade of tap-dancing elephants on his ceiling. He burrows further under the covers and pulls a pillow over his head when he hears footsteps on the stairs.

“It’s fine, mum, I’m just sleeping,” he mumbles when he hears the door open. He whines when the light gets turned on instead of the door closing softly like he wants to hear. The mattress dips slightly and then the duvet is pulled away from him. “No,” he sighs.

The mattress dips again under the weight of a second person. “What the fuck are you doing,” Calum asks him, poking his ribs meanly. The pillow is snatched from its resting place on top of Michael’s head. He swats at Calum’s arms, grumpy that Calum knows exactly where he’s ticklish. After a minute of it he’s had enough and sits up in bed. He blinks, finding the light a lot brighter than it usually is. The next thing he notices after he stops seeing bright spots burned into his field of vision every time he blinks is Luke sitting on Calum’s other side. To say that this is the last thing he had expected would be a gross understatement. He had been expecting Mali to come along, or maybe even Ashton in a misguided attempt on Calum’s part to get them to reconcile their differences. He hadn’t been expecting Calum to be in cahoots with someone he professes to hate. Or had, anyway, before Michael stopped checking his IMs.

He blinks at them both and goes, “Why are you two in cahoots, this is a nightmare, I’m going back to bed.”

“That’s what happens when you decide to drop off the face of the earth for a week,” Luke says. He flicks the bottom of Michael’s foot - it makes him yelp and pull his foot back, toes twitching involuntarily - and looks around the room with a critical eye. “You didn’t answer my IMs,” he adds, voice a little petulant. Michael shrugs, leaning back against the wall. He wonders why they came together instead of checking up on him separately. It doesn’t make any sense.

Michael sighs. “Sorry,” he says. “I’ve just… I haven’t been feeling very well.” He’s sure he looks like hell - he hasn’t showered in a week, so his hair is greasy and slightly matted, fringe plastered to his forehead, and that’s not counting the distinct odor wafting out every time he raises his arms slightly. He’s embarrassed of the empty Cheetos bags littering the floor, the unwashed laundry piled by the door, the stack of plates and row of empty glasses. Like, he knows that Calum’s room can get just as messy but this feels different somehow. He drags his fingers through his hair, trying to think of an excuse that will get his friends out of his room. Instead he asks, “Why are you here together?”

Calum looks annoyed. “You’re an asshole,” he tells Michael. “I was - What,” he hisses when Luke punches him in the arm lightly. “Okay, okay, we were worried about you. You weren’t answering either of our IMs. You weren’t on Myspace. It’s not like you to go totally off the grid like that.” When he reaches up to fix the collar of his t-shirt Michael notices that Calum’s nails are painted chipped black, most likely Mali’s influence. He doesn’t say anything about it, though, just lets Calum tear into him for being a bad friend and worrying them both. Luke doesn’t chime in with his own complaints, or anything, but he nods solemnly when Calum tells him that this isn’t like him.

And he knows that. He hasn’t felt like himself at all this week - all he can do is lie in bed and think about how shit his life is, replaying that moment with Ashton in his kitchen over and over and wishing he could take it all back. He wishes they had never been anything at all. “Something happened with Ashton,” he tells them both. Luke makes a horrid face and Calum clears his throat in this really bitchy way, like he has to physically force himself not to make a nasty comment or something. They both look at him expectantly, so he bites the inside of his lip and continues. “He just, like, I was having this really awful day and then he tried to talk to me and I thought he was trying to be nice? But instead he was all, ‘I don’t like seeing you with Luke, take me back’ and I told him to fuck off and it felt really, really bad, you guys.” His voice hitches mid-sentence as he blinks back the tears that form before they can start falling properly. “Sorry,” he says again, swiping at the corners of his eyes.

He feels stupid for crying. Luke’s hand curls around his foot, holding onto it like it’s a hand. “He’s a dick,” Luke decides, and Calum echoes the sentiment.

“So are you guys, like, friends now or something?” Michael asks, looking between Calum and Luke in confusion. They both look visibly horrified at the thought. But it has to mean something that they both came. Part of the reason he’s been so depressed is thinking about how he has these two really awesome friends and he’s never going to get to hang out with both of them together. He hates having to divide his time between the people he loves. And he might not be in love with Luke, or anything, but he thinks that Luke and Calum are awesome separately and he just knows that if they could get over this weird mutual dislike they would be great friends. He wriggles his foot out of Luke’s grasp. “I should probably shower at some point.”

With an exaggerated sniff, Calum nods his head and goes, “Careful, you wouldn’t want to wash all the punk off,” and throws his head back to laugh at his own dumb joke. To Michael’s surprise, Luke laughs too, hiding his chuckle behind his hand. When he catches Michael watching him laugh Luke looks away immediately, a disinterested expression replacing his look of amusement.

“My mum said we could all stay at Calum’s tonight if you want,” Luke offers.

Michael lets them boss him into the shower, where he stands under the hot water and scrubs himself all over with body wash until his skin is raw and pink. He washes his hair, too, washes all the oily buildup out and the last of the temporary color Mali had put in last month that had turned part of his fringe seaweed green. By the time he’s dried himself off and found dubiously clean clothes to put on, Calum and Luke have made quick work of tidying his room up so that it’s habitable again. When he comes out of his bathroom Luke’s spraying an air freshener around while Calum fans the spray around with a towel. Granted, it looks like they were playing with Luke’s lighter to make a stream of fire before that, so he’s not entirely sure their intentions were charitable when they started. Michael appreciates it all the same.

He throws an arm over each of his friends’ shoulders as they leave to trade his house for Calum’s, goes, “I love you guys, you know that?” As they walk Luke’s hand slips down to cling to his own and Calum veers slightly away, either embarrassed by their holding hands or indulgent of what he considers a bad choice on Michael’s part. The hand-holding part, at least, is nice. Luke holds his hand the whole way to the house. It’s especially soothing as they pass the corner of Ashton’s street and Michael wills himself not to turn and look down the road to see if anyone is home.

If Joy or David notice the intrusion of a third body into their sleepover, they don’t comment on it. He has the feeling that they know, vaguely, that Luke is his something-or-other. They watch a bootlegged copy of _Mean Girls_ that Mali had gotten from somebody at the college - she pays five dollars and he gives her the latest movies on burned DVDs with the titles written on them in a blocky, steady print - and Michael sits in the middle. They share a massive bowl of popcorn and for once Calum doesn’t accuse him of sprinkling his fingers over the bowl. After _Mean Girls_ they watch _50 First Dates_. Nobody laughs at any of Adam Sandler’s jokes; halfway through the film Luke leans his head on Michael’s shoulder and Michael lets it stay there, unsure if he’s supposed to do something in response.

Before Calum’s parents go to bed that night, Joy pokes her head into the living room to read them the riot act as she usually does. “Don’t stay up too late, boys,” she says. Then, with a pointed look at Michael, she adds, “Make sure you leave the bedroom door open, please,” and as soon as she’s left the room Calum punches Michael in the thigh.

“Fuck off,” Michael says in response. Like he’d have sex while Calum was in the same room with him. Like he’d ever have sex in Calum’s bedroom. The thought makes him so nervous he starts giggling uncontrollably. Luke, on the other hand, has gone an interesting shade of pink and covered his face with his hands. He knows Joy is just doing her duty as a mum, but still. That’s so embarrassing. When they finally get tired enough to go upstairs to bed Calum spreads out two sleeping bags instead of the usual pile of mismatched bedding and pillows. It’s uncomfortable; Michael feels weird about the fact that everyone is treating him like some kind of depraved sex fiend.

He’s starting to think he doesn’t really want Luke as his boyfriend. The problem is, everyone already thinks that Luke is his boyfriend and the way they’re treating him is very boyfriend-y and Michael doesn’t know how to get out of this commitment gracefully. He’d rather they be just friends. Maybe then he could convince Luke and Calum to be friends with each other. The other thing that’s bothering him is that he doesn’t want to, like, break Luke’s heart or something. Not that he’s presumptuous to think that Luke has fallen in love with him in the short time they’ve known each other, but if he had any expectations about where their relationship was heading Michael would hate to crush those. He likes to think that he’s considerate with other people’s hearts, at least.

He lies awake long after Calum and Luke have both fallen asleep, thinking about it. In the morning Calum’s the first to awaken. Michael, when he wakes up, can hear Calum and Mali squabbling all the way from the kitchen. “You’re doing it wrong,” Mali complains, followed swiftly by the sound of a silicon spatula whistling through the air and slapping on Calum’s bare skin. Michael assumes they’re making breakfast. It is, after all, a long-standing tradition on Sunday mornings as long as they’re both home. He wonders if they’re both up early to give him and Luke privacy or something.

Considering this, he rolls over in the sleeping bag to check if Luke’s still sleeping. “Good morning,” Luke says sleepily.

“Hey,” Michael replies. He doesn’t know if he’s supposed to do anything special since they’re alone. He has the feeling that Calum left them alone together on purpose - even though he doesn’t necessarily approve of Luke, he and Michael are still best friends and it’s rude to cock-block a bro - but he doesn’t know where things go from here. If he’s supposed to be feeling something, he isn’t. Mostly he’s just hungry; his stomach growls loudly and he feels his face get hot with embarrassment. It doesn’t feel like they’re in a relationship. He’s kind of scared to ask - there are so many things that could go wrong. He’s working up the nerve to maybe say something about it when Calum and Mali race into the room laughing and shrieking, and the bubble of the moment is popped by the distraction.

Warped Tour carries on late into August. Michael spends a lot of time avoiding Alex and getting sunburnt. He’s sitting in the back of the van in Sacramento when Luke and Calum descend upon him - they’re supposed to be counting out merch, they’re useless at it - and disturb his impromptu nap in the blistering-hot sun streaming through the dirty van window. Calum tumbles into him first, knocking him in the shoulder and wrenching his earbuds out of his ears painfully. Luke bursts into the van with slightly more decorum, slipping out of his cheap plastic Old Navy thongs before hopping into the front seat and staring over it at him.

“Mikey,” Calum says, panting slightly after what had clearly been a race back to the van, “Michael. M-dawg. My oldest friend. I have a very important, very sincere question for you.” He wraps his hand around Michael’s, giving what are possibly the biggest, most pleading puppydog eyes he’s used on Michael to date.

Luke scowls and butts in with, “Calum, you didn’t even know about this until today. Stop trying to steal him from me before I’ve even asked!”

“You’ve had days to! I’m asking him!” Calum hisses, holding fast to Michael’s hand.

Michael sits up and looks between his bandmates for an explanation. Not that he’s not enjoying the attention - he hasn’t been fought over by boys since that time in Milwaukee when Louis had gotten into a fistfight with Alex for him so he could make a clean getaway - but it is somewhat daunting to have them fighting over him. They’re usually fighting each other, or over each other, or over how much they apparently hate each other. It’s all very cyclical. Josh says it’s their form of foreplay, but Michael has not yet seen any evidence on the part of either of them to indicate that they’re harboring any kind of secret, pining-type feelings for each other. He stares at them, waiting for his explanation. Luke makes an ugly face and reaches out for Calum.

He goes, “Come on, you said Mikey could be my date! I didn’t get to go to real prom! You owe me!” He punches Calum in the shoulder for emphasis and Calum, not one to be cowed by Luke, comes back with a solid punch of his own to Luke’s sternum. Michael lets them carry on for a moment - get it out of their systems like he always does - and considers the logistics of filming their fights and selling them to one of those, like, weird emo boy kissing sites. He can Photoshop in the kissing parts. Then he thinks that it’s probably creepy to be thinking of his friends that way - Louis is having too much of an influence on him, fuck - and Calum and Luke have escalated into a shouting match without him noticing.

“Boys,” he says in a calm, even tone. Neither of them stop shouting at the other. “Boys,” he says again, in his shouty ‘How the fuck are ya, insert city name here’ voice. His throat protests, but the other two immediately stop their argument to turn and look at him. “Would somebody please tell me what is going on? You two sound like you woke up in crazy town this morning.” Out of habit more than anything, he flicks his fringe out of his eyes; it’s too short to do much more than sway slightly. He’s pretty sure his unwashed hair is in the beginning stages of matting. It feels stiff like doll hair.

In the front seat, Luke straightens up and says in this small, very prissy voice, “Warped prom is tomorrow and I want you to go with me.” Calum immediately chimes in with a protestation - “He’s my best friend, fuckface, obviously he’s taking me!” - and Luke barely manages to restrain his annoyance to add, “So will you go with me then?”

For a moment he sits there mulling it over. He hates it when they do this - put him in the middle of their petty squabbles - and even more he hates having to choose between friends because he thinks it’s bad for band harmony. In a snap decision Michael does what most people would do in that situation, which is to lie through his teeth. “Sorry guys,” he sighs. “I asked Harry if he’d go ages ago. You’ll have to find other dates.” He makes sure to look extra apologetic so they can’t be mad at him. And they won’t, anyway; they are never mad at him when it comes to Harry Styles. They might not understand his and Harry’s friendship but they can, at least, appreciate what their friendship does for the band’s career. For a brief three week period their record sales had almost doubled after Harry was papped wearing a 5 Seconds of Summer t-shirt leaving the Ellen show. He makes a mental note to call Harry as soon as he can. It might be a bit of a stretch to have him in Los Angeles by tomorrow night unless he’s already there for something.

His bandmates visibly deflate. Clearly he had been their last resort for a date - Calum has his thinking face on - and he’s glad not to have to make that decision between his two best friends. “Goddammit,” Luke mutters under his breath. He picks at the black polish sloppily applied to his nails. Hayley from Paramore had painted them for him a while back and he’s kept it up since then. There’s Sharpie trailing up the side of his leg and under the bottom of his shorts. Out of the three of them, Luke should be the one with the least difficulty finding another date. Michael wonders if maybe he was waiting for someone else to ask him, but Luke would tell them if he had a crush on someone. Wouldn’t he? They’re his best friends - yes, even Calum - and they don’t keep secrets from each other.

Well. Except for Michael’s little white lie about already having a Warped prom date. He presses the tips of his fingers together lightly and hedges, “Why don’t you go together?” He might as well have suggested they kill him for sport and then eat him, for the looks he gets from them. He sighs and presses his fingers to his temples instead. “Look, I don’t know what you want me to pull out of my ass at short notice like this unless one of you wants to ask Alex and, like, I’d really rather you not. Why haven’t you asked Louis or Zayn? Or Josh?” he tries hopefully. Calum shakes his head.

“Believe me, mate,” he says. “We’ve tried everyone we could think of.”

Michael resists the urge to say ‘I knew it’ out loud, partly because he doesn’t want to feel like a last resort and partly because that would make him a massive dick. There’s no point in rubbing in Calum and Luke’s undateable-ness - at least not to their faces, anyway - so instead he settles on, “I suppose you could do a raffle sort of thing. The fans would love it,” he tells them, raising his eyebrows pointedly. They’re not exactly the type of band who sleeps with groupies; at least not the female ones, anyway. Calum maybe, but he hasn’t taken anyone to bed in… Michael doesn’t know how long. They kind of keep their sex lives separate from each other, which he’s more than okay with. He feels like Calum would tell him if he’d pulled, though. In a high-fivey, celebratory sort of way.

“I guess if there’s no one else,” Luke sighs. He’s rubbing the soles of his feet together in a decidedly anxious way. He’s also staring at Calum all wide-eyed. It’s the strangest expression; he seems bewildered and, obviously, more than a little anxious about the whole thing. There’s a brief flicker of emotion that Michael can’t place and then he’s back to his usual hard, sarcastic self.

“Brilliant,” Michael says brightly. “Now that you’ve reminded me, I must call Harry and find out if we’re doing that whole… matching colors bit.” Before anyone can protest he pulls himself off the bench seat of the van and out the sliding door. The grass is burnt and crunchy under his bare feet. He doesn’t mind it, really. He waits until he’s out of sight of the vans before pulling his phone out to call Harry. The number is in his speed dial. He punches the 7 key and waits for Harry to pick up the phone.

“‘lo,” Harry says on the other end. “Mikey? I’m just in a shoot, hang on a second,” followed by the unmistakable sound of clothing being unzipped and then shed. “Did you know I’m going to be on the cover of Seventeen magazine next month?”

Michael has to roll his eyes. “You’re really moving up in the world,” he tells Harry. He’s not even being sarcastic. Then a deep breath in, a shaky exhale, and he launches straight into the question. “So listen, I need a massive favor. I had to lie to Calum and Luke about you being my date to Warped prom so I really, really need your help, mate. Like, I understand if you can’t do it and I know this is really short notice but I’m-”

Harry cuts him off abruptly. “Why are we lying to your best friends, exactly?” he wants to know. Trust him to be a paragon of morality and diplomacy at all times. In the background someone asks him to raise his arm and Michael can picture him raising one arm obediently while some harried-looking stylist strips him of his clothes while he’s talking on his stupidly impractical cell phone. It’s tiny and round and he only bought it because the cover is red. There’s the sound of a zipper somewhere far-off; it’s probably his pants, it’s always his pants.

“… It’s the principle of the thing, Haz,” Michael says. In the background someone goes, ‘Chin up, Harry,’ in a very annoyed voice. Is he really talking on the phone in the middle of a photo shoot? “Am I on speaker?”

“Sorry. Anyway! Where do I need to be, and when,” Harry asks, speaking loudly over the voice of his handler. Neither of them particularly like him - a dark-haired, sallow, anonymous-looking man who thinks that anything besides Harry wearing a letterman’s jacket and khakis everywhere he goes is too controversial for America. They settle the rest of the details and Harry of course tells Michael to forget whatever he had been planning to wear, he’s got something in mind. Michael of course is relieved by that; he hadn’t given any thought to clothing yet, stuck instead on convincing Harry to be his fake date to get out of having to choose between his bandmates. Sometimes he has to sit back for a moment and marvel at his friendship with Harry Styles. Since they’ve become friends his life has been five thousand percent more organized and efficient.

Once when he had still been staying in Los Angeles over the break, he came back to his and Louis’ hotel room to find that Harry had let himself in - read: had Dave pick the lock - and organized his entire suitcase for him. Brand new clothes sometimes appear in his suitcase with no prior warning, just a note scrawled on the tag in Harry’s familiar chicken scratch that says ‘XO - H’ and nothing else. As a result he’s probably dressing better than he ever has before, which he must admit is a remarkable amount of foresight on Harry’s part. Because it’s never stuff he’s embarrassed to wear - it’s always, like, vintage t-shirts from the CBGB or something. The t-shirt he’s wearing right now belongs to Harry, actually. Michael’s more than okay with Harry Styles micromanaging his life. It’s more productive than letting Luke do it. Luke gets very shrill when things don’t go according to the plan laid out meticulously in the band binder that he and Liz put together before each tour. The shrill thing he could definitely do without.

Later in the day, after they’ve solidified their plans Michael hides out in the trailer pretending to count merch to avoid his bandmates and any other potential suitors. It’s hot in the trailer, even with the door to it open. He doesn’t mind it much. They play their set that night and he knows it’s not great - he knows he’s losing his voice and Calum and Luke are both off, distracted by other things - but the crowd doesn’t seem to notice when Luke misses a beat in ‘Beside You’ and Calum stumbles because of it. He notices, though. He doesn’t know if he should say something or not. Like, clearly something’s going on between them - maybe their weird thing has finally reached its fever pitch, maybe they’re both pissed off at him because he wouldn’t choose between them. He’s not going to speculate on what it is. There’s always something going on between Luke and Calum and he’s never been able to figure it out.

He goes on ignoring it when they have beers behind the trailer after load-out with Louis and Josh. Notably absent is Zayn - though Zayn seems to know everyone on tour, so it’s entirely possible he’s found other people to hang out with for the night. “Where’s Zayn,” he asks anyway, flipping his phone open to text Harry. It’s a Moto Razr - the phone, obviously - and he has no new messages.

Louis shrugs. “Hell if I know,” he goes. He’s picking idly at the last remnants of his newest tattoo’s scabbing. Michael resists the urge to slap his hand away. If Louis wants to fuck up his tattoos that’s his own business.

“Are you going with anyone?”

“Cliffo,” Louis says in a long drawn-out breath. “You know I don’t do that shit.” And Michael hates the nickname but knows it’s a consequence of Louis’ fondness for him. The English are a weird breed, making nicknames out of surnames instead of something more familiar like using his first name or, hell, even his middle name.

Michael taps his index fingers together. He’s going to have to handle Louis delicately on the matter of Harry coming - if Luke and Calum have a strange rivalry then Louis and Harry are two steps shy of launching into their own private cold war. “Well,” he says, popping into the back of the van to grab two new beers from the cooler, “Harry’s coming with me. Just in case, like, you had any brilliant ideas like using me as your rent-a-date.”

“I would never,” Louis scoffs. His eyebrows are drawn up in that pissed-off bitchy way he does, lips pressed so firmly together that they disappear into a hard line across his face.

Privately Michael has to wonder if there’s anyone in the world for whom he would be a first choice. It’s starting to feel like he’s just an accessory to hang off anybody’s arm if he has the time, and it’s a shitty feeling. Which. He’s being the worst friend ever by doing the same to Harry. He knows; he’s a massive hypocrite and he feels bad-guilty about it. It hangs over his head while he sleeps next to Luke in the van - Calum having commandeered the driver’s seat for himself as they won’t be driving down to Los Angeles until the early hours of the morning - and the whole next day through the blur of signings and playing their final set of Warped. By all rights he should feel elated; they’ve just completed what is basically his dream tour. Instead he finds that he feels strangely hollow.

Their last set is early in the day. After they’ve loaded out for the final time he meets Harry in the parking lot. Harry’s heavily disguised despite the heat, sporting a windbreaker and fanny pack - to try and blend in with the non-existent tourists? - and all his hair tucked up under a particularly ugly Von Dutch trucker hat. “I’m emulating my inner Paris Hilton,” Harry explains. He pulls a lip gloss out of the fanny pack and applies it liberally. It’s the same shade of pink that Paris and Nicole are known for.

“What’s that?” Michael asks, noticing the garment bags draped over Harry’s arm. He’s having awful visions of the get-ups that Harry’s stylists always want to put him in, picturing himself in some kind of awful leather catsuit or something that’s going to make him uncomfortable and itchy the whole night. It’s vaguely reminiscent of Mali’s prom. Michael didn’t actually spend much time at his own prom - he went with Calum and since he had already dropped out of school by that time, the headteacher hadn’t been particularly glad to see him. They’d spent a long time sitting on the bleachers because neither of them had the nerve to ask someone to dance, and then they’d gone home and played Playstation until the sun came up.

Paul gives him a grim look in sympathy. “Styles picked it himself,” he says gruffly, managing to suppress a smirk but somehow managing to convey it with his eyes anyway. He puts his sunglasses on and crosses his arms over his chest, looking surly while they both get changed behind the Town Car. Michael wrestles himself into the skin-tight jeans while Harry laughs at his scrawny legs. The jeans are not bad; they’re something Michael would probably pick for himself. Once he’s got the button done Harry piles belts onto him, criss-crossing them until his hips feel heavy and it feels like he’s staggering rather than walking normally. The shirt is not bad, either. It’s a vintage Guns ’N Roses t-shirt, torn nearly to shreds, and it reveals a bit more skin than Michael is entirely comfortable with. His first attempt at putting it on ends with him sticking his arm through the wrong hole, causing them both to break into nervous, hysterical laughter.

Of the two of them Harry has the more… adventurous… outfit. He’s wearing leather pants paired with an impossibly puffy white shirt. “You look like a gay pirate,” Michael tells him. He slips back into his beaten-up Vans as he speaks, checking his reflection in the side mirror of the Town Car. Out of nowhere Paul produces a small arsenal of beauty products. He’s a good companion for Harry - always very mindful, very discreet. He’s got Michael’s preferred brands of styling wax and hairspray in the case. Michael makes a mental note to get Paul a really, really good Christmas gift this year.

After they’re dressed Harry does his eyeliner for him - thicker than he would, usually - and it’s amazing how much more quickly the whole process goes when someone else is putting it on for him. “One last thing,” Harry says as he ducks into the back of the Town Car. He produces a small, sleek digital camera and hands it over to Paul, who takes it obligingly. “Take our picture,” Harry demands, throwing his arms over Michael’s shoulders dramatically. The flash goes off, leaving bright spots in Michael’s field of vision.

“Looks good,” Paul tells them. His hands look comically large holding the tiny camera. Michael cranes his neck to look at the small digital display; they look exactly like an awkward prom date should. He’s smiling too big in the photo and Harry looks like one of those really nervous dogs that kind of just shakes and then pees on the carpets whenever anything exciting happens.

The prom-goers trickling in through the main gates are in varying states of fancy dress to almost-total undress. Michael flashes his tour badge at the security - an annoyed-looking guy with a mustache - and leads Harry through to the area they’ve roped off for the event without thinking twice about reaching for the pop star’s hand. The DJ is playing cheesy pop hits and thus far no one is dancing. Harry looks a bit pained when he notices the lack of dancing but Michael pulls him past the dance floor to the punch bowl. Which clearly is the best part of the night - someone’s dumped a bunch of vodka into the nonalcoholic fruit punch, giving it the taste and smell of paint thinner. Michael scoops them both some of the strong-smelling liquid into cheap plastic cups.

“Drink this,” he tells Harry. “It’ll put hair on your chest.”

Harry frowns at the drink doubtfully and goes, “I’m pretty sure that chest hair is not in my contract.”

After they’ve hit the punch bowl Calum and Luke descend on them, clearly having pre-gamed before arriving at Warped prom, clearly having been bickering the whole time. “Tell Luke I am not dancing with him,” Calum demands, swaying slightly on his feet. It’s a moot point, seeing as he’s hanging onto Luke for support when he makes the demand. And they’re already both swaying where they stand; would it really be so awful for them to sway together, in time to the music? Michael absolutely does not say this aloud. He knows better than to start a screaming match between the two of them while they’re drunk, even with the comfort of knowing that Paul is lurking a few meters away to keep an eye on things. Harry smiles at him sympathetically, tight-lipped. He’s had to hear more than a few of Michael’s late-night rants about why Calum and Luke can’t just kiss and make up already.

Before Michael can say anything Harry tells them, “You’re contractually obligated to dance with your date at least once at these things, or they’ll make you do the chicken dance. At least, that’s what I’ve heard.” He schools his expression into a perfect mask of concerned terror at the mention of the chicken dance and starts to do the characteristic arm-flapping dance move to demonstrate. Afterward he takes a prim sip of his drink and promptly pours the rest of it into Michael’s half-empty cup, presumably because it tastes terrible. “Jesus tap-dancing Christ,” Harry sputters, “That tastes fucking awful.”

“Are you allowed to swear?” Luke asks.

“Fuck,” Harry replies cheekily. “Shit, balls, bollocks, um… Fuck, I don’t curse a lot, I don’t know what the good swears are.”

Michael steers him away from the punch bowl before they can do any more damage. People are starting to look at them - he doesn’t want to cause a scene, doesn’t want any of the hardcore punk band dudes to come and give him a hard time about his date being Teen Pop Sensation Harry Styles™. “Look,” he says desperately, “There’s Hayley from Paramore, you haven’t met her yet, let me introduce you,” and he hauls Harry by the elbow towards Hayley and her boyfriend Chad, who’s from New Found Glory. They’re nice people. Hayley is friends with Taylor Swift; there’s no way she of all people can judge him for being friends with Harry. Maybe she can even introduce them to Taylor. Harry would like that, he thinks.

Weeks go by with Michael dividing his time neatly between Luke and Calum. He has no problem with this - it works out surprisingly well for him because if he skips his afternoon classes he can have afternoons with Luke and then after footie practice lets out he has Calum’s undivided attention all evening. It’s something that could go on into the foreseeable future without a hitch until the inevitable happens: Luke’s mum invites him over one afternoon to meet the family. Which kind of ruins the entire thing because Michael had been planning on just never confronting the whole are-they-aren’t-they about the dating thing with Luke. Like. Maybe if he just ignores it for long enough they’ll never have to approach it.

“It’s just how she is, you’ll see,” Luke promises him as they walk from the high school toward Luke’s house. “It’s not a big deal or anything. She wants to make sure you’re not, like, an ax murderer or anything. Don’t mention about the skipping school thing though, or she won’t let me hang out at your house anymore.”

Michael rolls his eyes. They’re holding hands as they walk. It’s something that just felt right when it started and Michael hadn’t exactly had the heart or the inclination to put a stop to it. He likes the physical affection. He wouldn’t, like, have sex with Luke or anything - he really doesn’t think of Luke that way, despite making out with him pretty regularly - but the hand-holding and the stuff like that he’ll enjoy as long as it lasts. “I’m more worried about your brothers,” he confesses. Ever since Luke had started talking about his older brothers Michael had been a bit paranoid that they would want to beat him up or something for messing with their little brother. Particularly because Michael doesn’t want to date Luke; he’s scared that if he says anything about it now the two big, beefed-up looking dudes in some of Luke’s Myspace photos will come after him and… Well. He doesn’t really know what people do when they get into fights. Challenge him to a midnight duel at the flagpole? Key his non-existent car? Vandalize his locker, maybe?

Luke squeezes his hand. “It’ll be fine,” he says confidently.

A few minutes later they’re walking up Luke’s driveway together. Michael is pretty sure he’s never been more nervous in his life. Luke’s family drives an awful-looking purple station wagon with the older brothers’ university bumper stickers plastered along the back of it. Somehow that fact makes him feel more anxious instead of less; at a more rational moment he would probably laugh at himself for being intimidated by a woman who drives a purple Volvo station wagon, but at the moment he’s more focused on not embarrassing himself and then dying. The Hemmings house is shorter than his own and messier in the same way that Calum’s is - lived-in, like people actually spend time there together instead of retreating to opposite rooms in the house to get away from each other. Though Michael’s own mum has been around a lot more recently, he’s still getting used to the whole ‘family togetherness’ thing. It kind of freaks him out.

“So, this is mine,” Luke says. They take their shoes off by the front door and, sheepishly, Luke adds, “Sorry it’s not much.” He won’t meet Michael’s gaze as he looks around at the coat rack with various sweaters and jackets thrown recklessly onto it, the number of shoes crowded onto the rack by the front door, the array of things on the living room and dining room tables. The living room couch looks comfortable and worn-in, unlike the brand new white sofa that Michael’s mum had just ordered and then promptly put a plastic cover over to avoid making a mess of it. He doesn’t mention any of this. Other people’s houses are fascinating to him. Sometimes he wonders what it must be like to live with a family that genuinely enjoys each other. It’s a foreign concept to him. Like, he gets some of it through Calum and Mali but it’s not the same as having his own family around all the time.

“It’s brilliant,” Michael tells Luke enthusiastically. “Like, seriously, your house is great.”

“C’mon, I think mum is out back,” Luke goes, standing on his tip-toes to peer out the sliding glass door at the back of the house. Out back there’s a pool and a mid-sized hot tub. Michael is flooded with envy; he has the fanciest house of anyone he knows and even he doesn’t have a fucking pool in his back yard. Luke fiddles with the lock on the door and jimmies it open, swearing under his breath at the fault latch. “Mum, we’re home,” he shouts into the yard.

A woman’s voice replies with, “In the garden!” They wander around to the side of the house to find Luke’s mum elbows-deep in potting soil and plant bulbs. “Hand me another bag of those bulbs, would you, dear,” Luke’s mum says. Michael hands her the bag dutifully and watches her cover the bulbs in soil. After she’s done with the gardening she stands, wipes her hands on her jeans and shakes Michael’s hand briskly. “Call me Liz, Mrs. Hemmings is my mother-in-law,” she instructs him. And Michael doesn’t really know what he had been expecting from the brief glimpses he’s gotten of Liz from her picking Luke up in the evenings but he’s a little startled, nonetheless, by her matter-of-fact attitude and the fact that she’s a mum who wears jeans and does the gardening with her bare hands. He can’t imagine his mum or Joy doing that.

Luke looks like he’s expecting to be lectured or something, or at the very least get a warning speech about leaving doors open or respect. He looks at his mother warily for a moment and then says, carefully, “We’re going to hang out in my room.”

Liz tells them “Have fun, boys!” cheerfully and waves them off inside the house. Luke looks so shocked he might faint.

“She didn’t even tell us to leave the door open or anything,” Luke says when they’re inside again. They’re climbing the stairs to Luke’s bedroom, which is at the top of the house. It’s technically part of the attic - they have to climb a narrow set of stairs that creaks terribly whenever Michael takes a step - and it’s a small, poorly ventilated room but Michael loves it instantly. Luke’s plastered the slanted walls with band posters everywhere. There are several that Michael recognizes - Mest, New Found Glory, Simple Plan - and even more that he doesn’t recognize.

“I’m moving into your room,” Michael decides, flopping stomach-down on the bed. “You don’t get a choice.” Even though he probably has better stuff in his room - like his computer and stereo and everything - he likes Calum’s and Luke’s rooms way more. Living in the basement had been fun at first but now it feels slightly more like a dungeon than he’s comfortable with. Once he’s thoroughly examined the comics on Luke’s shelf he moves onto the mess of CD cases on top, flipping through them to see what bands Luke listens to. It’s then that he notices the most prominent feature of Luke’s room. And goes, “Oh, holy shit, I think I just came in my pants. Why didn’t you tell me you played drums?” he demands, pelting Luke with a stray drumstick he finds on the floor.

“I told you ages ago!” Luke protests, ducking out of the way in time. “It’s not my fault you weren’t paying attention!”

“You’ve been holding out on me!” Michael goes, getting up to sit on Luke’s lap in the desk chair. “We could have been making sweet, sweet music this whole time but instead all we’ve done is make out!” He could honestly hit Luke if he didn’t like the kid so much. He decides, “You’re joining my band, you don’t get a choice, you and Calum can figure out your weird thing.” He’s so excited that the words all come out in a single breath. And Luke, for his part, only looks mildly fazed by this turn of events.

All Luke says at first is, “So does this mean you don’t want to be my boyfriend then?” He looks slightly guilty about it, which leads Michael to question all of their previous interactions because he’s felt like they’ve been doing it for Luke’s benefit, not his, but clearly Luke has other ideas about that… Michael nods hesitantly. Relieved, Luke tells him, “Good, because I don’t want to fuck up your band or whatever. Do you guys have a Purevolume or anything?”

They spend the next while looking up bands on Myspace and downloading guitar and drum tabs. There’s a woeful lack of bass tabs so they spend most of the evening painstakingly transposing tabs for him from CD to guitar to what Michael thinks is probably for the bass. At one point Liz pops up to check on them and finds them with their heads bent together over Michael’s lyrics book. “You two have been awfully quiet,” Liz hums. “If I didn’t know any better I’d think you were having sex.” She chuckles to herself and grabs Luke’s laundry basket to take downstairs with her. “Crazy, right?”

“Mum,” Luke whines, burying his face in his hands. “That’s so embarrassing, oh my god, we’re just doing band stuff.” He hides his face until his mother has left the room and even after that his cheeks are faintly pink with embarrassment. It’s like something finally clicks into place. Michael meets both of Luke’s brothers later that night and they ask the usual amount of awkward and embarrassing questions over dinner, then promptly lose interest in him until it’s time to do the washing-up and drag him and Luke outside to kick a football around for an hour or so. By the end of the night Liz has decided that it’s fine for Luke to walk with Michael all the way home and then back again by himself.

“Be safe,” Liz tells them as they’re putting their shoes on. “I know it’s only a few blocks but it’s getting dark, okay?” She gives Luke a hug and a kiss on the cheek - which he looks properly embarrassed by - and then gives Michael a hug as well, telling him, “I’m so glad you two are friends. I think Luke really needed someone to help him come out of his shell a bit.”

Michael doesn’t know what to say to that, so he just goes, “I’m glad we’re friends too. Thanks for having me over,” and then he holds Luke’s hand on the way home because he is buzzing with excitement. They could be, like, a proper band now. He knows it probably won’t work out - Calum is going to go off to uni and forget all about their aspirations of getting signed or playing Warped Tour - but for the moment it’s the best thing in his life and he doesn’t want to let the moment go to waste. He’s not going to let himself stress out about Calum going to footie camp. After all, now he has Luke to hang out with. It’s not like he’s going to be completely alone anymore.

As they’re walking closer to Michael and Calum’s neighborhood - actually they’re right by Calum’s street - Luke stops and goes, “Hang on, there’s something I need to do first.” They cut through the playground of the primary school and Luke stops to scoop a handful of pebbles from the ground before dragging Michael by the arm until they’re in front of Calum’s house. Since they’ve cut through the playground Michael almost doesn’t recognize where they are. He’s used to taking the long way round; it makes him kind of a wimp but he’s scared of getting yelled at for cutting through there late at night even though he’s lived here his whole life. “I can’t believe I’m about to do this,” Luke says under his breath. They’ve stopped just under Calum’s bedroom window - and Michael knows this because he’s stood on this very lawn in this very position himself, before David and Joy got him his own key - and he doesn’t know what’s going on until Luke starts pelting Calum’s window with the pebbles.

The window opens slowly; Calum’s bedroom window is heavy and it’s late enough that he was probably either asleep or masturbating. “What do you want,” Calum groans into the night.

“Oi,” Luke shouts, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Be in a band with me and Mikey.”

To be honest Michael is expecting a flat-out no. He knows that Calum and Luke don’t like each other and that they’d only be doing it for his sake. He feels pretty crappy about that. He’s not expecting the window to slam shut and then for Calum’s bedroom light to come on. They stand on the lawn for a minute more anyway. Luke looks like he’s about to give up when Calum comes out the front door clutching his footie camp acceptance letter. “For real?” Calum asks them, standing on the grass in his bare feet. The lawn is still damp from the sprinklers being on earlier to water the grass so grass is sticking to his feet, but he doesn’t seem to mind it. Luke nods, doing that pigeon-toed thing that he does.

“If you and I can put aside our petty differences,” Luke says. “I mean, we already have the same best friend. So. Obviously we must have some things in common.”

A pained expression crosses Calum’s face as he looks between Michael and Luke and then his acceptance letter. “Don’t make me regret this,” he says, and then he rips up the letter without ceremony and lets the breeze take the shredded paper away. It settles on a lawn several houses down and none of them care quite enough to go retrieve the litter. Michael launches himself into Calum’s arms excitedly and Luke joins in a moment later, throwing his arms around both of them. They’re a real band.

“Holy shit,” Michael says. “We’re a real band. Like, with instruments and everything.”

Calum looks at them both darkly and goes, “If this whole thing goes ass-up and I miss out on becoming a famous football player, I blame you two. Come on, let’s play FIFA in celebration.” Luke calls his mum and somehow manages to get Liz to agree to a sleepover even though it’s a school night. While he’s doing that Michael and Calum get FIFA set up in the living room and drag the extra blankets down from the linen closet to make a pile on the floor. They spend their first night of official banding playing Calum’s Playstation and thinking of cover songs to learn. When they’ve had their fill of FIFA, they crawl under the blankets to sleep. Calum asks, “So what’s going on between you two, then?”

Michael and Luke look at each other guiltily. “Um,” Luke says. “I guess we’re just friends? Also my mum said she ‘knew all along’ and ‘it was inevitable’,” he adds, with the appropriate amount of finger quotes. “I don’t want to ruin the band though. That would be super shitty.”

“Me either,” Michael agrees.

It’s Calum’s turn to breathe a sigh of relief. “Thank god,” he says. “I don’t know if I could have pretended to like you for Mikey’s sake. Like, no offense.” No one mentions the fact that Calum will have to actually, like, learn to work constructively with Luke instead of merely tolerating him. For the moment Michael can put up with mild irritation. It’s a stepping-stone on the way to friendship, hopefully. And it’s probably asking too much to want them to be best friends, so he will have to settle for whatever he can get. He’s happy that Luke’s parents seem on board with the band thing. His own mum will be, he knows, and there will probably be a massive row about Calum quitting football to be in the band but secretly Michael is happy that Calum chose him over footie because it was honestly destroying their friendship. That, and him kind-of dating Luke. He’s glad not to be doing that anymore. Things feel much simpler with them as just friends. Things are going to get so much better from here. It’s like everything in his life is falling into place: his friends, his band…

Okay, so maybe there are some hurdles still to cross. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do about school since he’s been kind of… ignoring the fact that he’s failing all of his classes. He doesn’t know if they have a chance at getting signed since they haven’t even played all three of them together yet, but he has a good feeling about it. And there’s the woeful mess that is his love life, though he suspects that that won’t improve until he manages to get out of Sydney for a while. But overall, things are starting to look up for the first time in months. It’s a comforting feeling. And, like, maybe he can convince his mum to let him drop out of school. He’s only been trying for ages now. It will all fall into place eventually, he thinks. Or else they’ll crash and burn. He sincerely hopes it’s the first one, though.

**Author's Note:**

> Wow. Okay. If you want, you can always come yell at me on [Tumblr](http://anxietycalling.tumblr.com). Also, there is more to this story! I'm writing it! Probably as we speak, or as you read, or something! It's happening! It's all happening so much!


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